Teaching Things You're Not Entirely Sure About

My daughter asked me why the sky is blue.

I said: “Because of the way sunlight scatters through the atmosphere. The blue wavelengths bounce around more than the others, so that’s what we see.”

She nodded. I nodded. We moved on.

Twenty minutes later, while she was watching TV, I was in the kitchen quietly Googling “why is the sky blue” to make sure I had that right. I did. Mostly. There’s a whole thing about Rayleigh scattering I had glossed over, but the bones were correct. I put my phone away feeling vindicated and slightly ridiculous.

This happens constantly. And I don’t think I’m alone.

The Instinct

There’s something that happens when your kid asks you a question. A switch flips. You don’t say “I’m not sure, let me look it up” — or at least, not right away. You say the thing. You say it with a confidence that feels, in the moment, completely genuine. The words just come out, assembled from half-remembered science classes and things you’ve read and things you think you’ve read and things that just sound right.

It’s not dishonesty. It’s something more automatic than that. You’re the dad. The kid is looking at you. The question is hanging in the air. Your brain reaches for the nearest plausible answer and hands it to your mouth before your frontal lobe has a chance to review it.

And then you hear yourself say it. And it sounds pretty good. So you commit.

The Subjects

There are subjects that invite this more than others.

How things work — engines, planes, toilets, electricity, microwaves. You have a general model of all of these. The general model is correct in outline and vague in every detail that actually matters. “The engine burns gas and the energy turns the wheels” is true the way “food goes in and energy comes out” is true. It is not wrong. It is also not sufficient for a curious eight-year-old who wants to know why the pistons have to move the way they do.

Nature — lightning, volcanoes, earthquakes, tides, why dogs can smell so well. You took earth science. You remember that tectonic plates exist. You are confident about tectonic plates. You are less confident about the specific mechanism by which tectonic plates cause tsunamis versus earthquakes versus volcanoes and why it’s different each time, and whether Hawaii is a hot spot or a plate boundary thing, and you always mix these up actually.

History — the parts that weren’t on the test. “Why did World War I start?” is a question that has broken historians. You will attempt it in 45 seconds while driving.

Animals — how fast is a cheetah, how long do dolphins live, can bears actually smell fear, what does a platypus actually do with that bill. You know facts about animals. You are not certain which facts are real and which you absorbed from a nature documentary in 1996.

The Phone Check

The phone check is a private ritual. It happens after the kid has moved on — when they’re playing, or eating, or asleep. You pull out the phone and you type the question quietly, like you’re doing something slightly embarrassing, which in a way you are.

What you’re looking for is confirmation. You want the first search result to say exactly what you said, in that order, with that level of detail. Usually it’s close. Sometimes you were more right than you thought and you feel a small quiet satisfaction. Sometimes you learn that you had the right concept but the wrong mechanism — the sky is blue for the reason you said, but the reason itself is more interesting than you made it sound. And occasionally you were wrong in a way that is going to require a follow-up conversation, which you will have to initiate yourself because your kid has completely forgotten they asked.

The follow-up conversation never happens. This is fine. They’ll ask again someday.

What You’re Actually Doing

Here’s the thing: the confident wrong answer isn’t actually the worst outcome. The worst outcome is a dad who responds to every question with “I don’t know” and leaves it there — not because honesty is bad, but because the incuriosity underneath it is. The message isn’t “I don’t know,” it’s “I don’t care to find out.”

What the confident-but-approximate answer signals, even when it’s a little off, is that the world is knowable. That there are reasons things work the way they do. That it’s worth having a theory.

And the phone check — the part you do in private, the part that feels slightly ridiculous — that’s actually the best part. That’s you modeling the thing you most want your kid to develop: the reflex to verify, to stay curious, to care whether you got it right.

You just do it quietly, where they can’t see you.

What Actually Works Better

Tell them the part you know. Then say the part you’re not sure about out loud.

“The engine burns gas and uses that energy to turn the wheels — I’m pretty confident about that part. How exactly the pistons connect to all of it I’m a little fuzzy on. Let’s look it up.”

This is harder than it sounds. It requires acknowledging the edge of what you know, which dads are not always trained to do. But kids are remarkably unbothered by it. They don’t need you to be a encyclopedia. They need you to be interested. A dad who says “I think it’s this, let me check” is modeling something more useful than a dad who delivers a lecture on atmospheric optics that turns out to be 80% accurate.

The phone comes out. You look it up together. They see how you find the answer — what you type, what source you click, how you read it. You explain it again, better this time, with the actual mechanism included. They might retain it. They might not. But they watched you be wrong and not care, and fix it, and move on. That’s the lesson.

The Real Inventory

If I’m honest about the things I’ve confidently explained to my kids and then fact-checked in private:

• How internal combustion engines work (mostly right)
• Why we see lightning before we hear thunder (right, but I initially had the math backwards)
• What causes a fever (confidently said “your body heating up to kill the virus,” which is directionally correct but more complicated)
• Why the moon looks bigger on the horizon (said it was atmosphere, which is actually wrong — it’s an optical illusion, the moon is the same size)
• How planes stay in the air (this one is genuinely disputed at the physics level and I should have said so instead of picking a side)
• Why dogs smell so much better than humans (I made up a number of smell receptors that was off by several hundred million)

The moon one I eventually corrected. The rest I have mostly let stand.

One True Thing

Your kid does not expect you to know everything. They expect you to act like you do, because that’s what you’ve always done, and it’s become part of the relationship. The authority is partly performance and they probably know that, at some level, already.

What they’re actually watching for is something simpler: whether you take the question seriously. Whether you find it interesting that the sky is blue instead of red. Whether you’d bother to check.

The answer to that one you already know.