Emily Miller Facebook ad: “The book I recommend to every parent”

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My daughter used to ask me thirty questions before breakfast. Last Tuesday I realized she hadn't asked me one in three days. A rainbow appeared over our street last spring and my six-year-old said "cool" and asked when we were going home to play her game. That was the moment I knew something was wrong. I'm a mom of two. My oldest just turned six. And for about six months before that rainbow, I'd been noticing something I couldn't unnotice. She'd stopped asking questions. Not all at once. Slowly. She just got quieter and quieter, the way a kid drifts off in the back seat of a car. Let me back up. When she was four, this girl was something else. The questions never stopped. Why does the moon follow our car. Why do my fingers wrinkle in the bath. Why is there foam on the ocean. She'd ask me stuff at breakfast that I'd still be thinking about at dinner. My husband used to joke she'd be insufferable as a teenager because she'd already know more than us. Then the questions started thinning out. I didn't catch it right away because I had a baby and I was running on three hours of sleep and we were just trying to get through the days. We'd given her the iPad on a long flight and somehow it never really left her hands after that. An hour here. An hour there. PBS Kids while I made dinner. A "learning app" on the way to swim class. The stuff every parenting article said was the okay version. Khan Academy Kids. Lingokids. Educational, I told myself. By five and a half she was different. She didn't ask why anymore. She asked can I. Can I watch one more. Can I have the tablet. Can I, can I, can I. The wonder was just gone. The rainbow moment was when I finally let myself admit it. I stood there on the sidewalk holding the stroller and I felt something cave in inside my chest. That night I started Googling at 1am. You probably know exactly what those searches look like. Why has my child lost curiosity. Is screen time making my kid less curious. Six year old won't read books anymore. How do I undo screen damage. I read everything. I tried everything. I did the screen detox. Three full days. By day two I was sitting in a Target parking lot trying not to cry because she'd had a full meltdown over a Bluey episode and I felt like the worst mother on the planet. We caved. I bought the Usborne books with the lift-the-flaps. She liked them for about eleven minutes. I subscribed to the box with the little projects. The boxes piled up unopened in the hall closet, right next to a wooden Montessori set I'd been so sure she'd love. I tried doing "wonder walks" where I'd point things out and ask her questions. She tolerated me for a few minutes and then asked if we could go home. Nothing worked. And the worst part, the part I couldn't say out loud, was that I was starting to think I was the broken one. Like maybe she was just who she was now, and I needed to make peace with it. I had a pediatrician appointment in March where I was fully planning to ask about ADHD assessments. But a week before that appointment, something happened that flipped everything around. I was at a birthday party for a boy in my daughter's class. His mom and I were standing near the snack table making small talk while the kids ran around the backyard. Her son sprinted up to us mid-game and said, totally out of nowhere, "Mom, why does my drink have bubbles when I shake it but the other one doesn't?" She gave him some quick answer about the soda being carbonated. He nodded and ran off. And I just stood there. Because my daughter was three feet away. And she hadn't asked me a question like that in months. I asked his mom, trying not to sound weird, what they did about screens. Because her son seemed exactly like my daughter two years ago. All motion, all questions, all curiosity. She kind of shrugged. "Honestly? We never really got into the screen thing. He just has his encyclopedia. He's obsessed with it. He'll sit and read it for an hour and then come out asking us a hundred things." I went home that night and I couldn't sleep. Because something clicked. I'd been thinking about this whole thing the wrong way. I'd been treating my daughter's curiosity loss like a behavior problem. Like if I just cut the screens and forced more nature walks she'd come back. But that wasn't it. That was never going to fix it. Curiosity isn't a habit you build by force. It's a loop. A kid asks a question. They get an answer that satisfies them and opens up two or three new questions. They ask those. They get more answers. The loop runs, and somewhere in their brain a small but enormous thing happens. They learn that wondering goes somewhere. That asking is worth doing. And what I'd been doing, without ever realizing it, was breaking the loop. When she asked me something while I was making dinner, I'd answer half-distracted. Sometimes I'd say "I don't know, sweetie." Sometimes I'd say "let's look it up later" and then we never did. Sometimes I'd hand her the iPad to find out, and the iPad would feed her something completely unrelated and her brain would learn that asking didn't actually lead anywhere. A child's brain is incredibly efficient. If asking doesn't lead anywhere, it stops asking. That was what happened to her. Not a damaged attention span. Not too much screen time, exactly. The loop in her head had just been broken too many times. Her brain had quietly concluded that questions were a dead end. But this other kid? He had something my daughter didn't. He had a place his questions always went. Every time he wondered something, he had a book he could open that answered him, in a way he could actually understand, illustrated, with more questions waiting on the next page. His loop never broke. His curiosity kept compounding. It wasn't willpower. It wasn't his mom being a better mom than me. It was just that his questions had somewhere to go and mine didn't. I ordered the comic version of the children's encyclopedia the next morning. I almost didn't even tell my husband because I was so tired of buying things that didn't work. It came four days later. I want to be honest about what happened because I know everyone wants to hear and then everything changed overnight. That isn't what happened. She flipped through it. Put it down. I felt my stomach drop with that familiar sinking feeling. Two days later I walked past her room and she was on her bed reading it. She came out twenty minutes later and asked me why parrots can imitate human speech. I almost cried into my coffee. The next week she asked me why flowing water doesn't freeze the way still water does. Then why lightning is seen before thunder is heard. Then why the sea looks blue when water in a glass is clear. The loop was running again. She wasn't asking because I was prompting her. She wasn't asking because I'd taken away the iPad. She was asking because she'd learned, in just a few days, that her questions had a place to go again. And once the loop ran a few times, her brain remembered. It's been about four months now. She still gets screen time. I'm not a screen-free household and I'm not going to pretend to be one. But the encyclopedia sits on her nightstand and most mornings I find it open to a different page than I left it the night before. Her teacher mentioned at the spring conference that she's "noticeably more engaged" than she was in the fall. I had to look down at my lap because I almost lost it right there in the tiny preschool chair. I'm writing this because I know somebody is reading this somewhere wondering if they've broken something in their child. You haven't. The loop is just sleeping. And the thing that wakes it up isn't a screen detox or another activity box or a Pinterest project. It's the almost embarrassingly simple act of giving them a place where their questions actually go. I'm not going to do a big sales pitch here. I'll just say what I bought, which is the comic version of a children's encyclopedia that other moms have been quietly passing around. Over twenty thousand families have one already. There's a window in your child's development where the loop can still be rebuilt, but it doesn't stay open forever. If you're somewhere reading this right now, like I was four months ago, you already know what you need to do. Get her one. Get him one. The questions will come back. I promise.

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getauvra.com

The book I recommend to every parent 📚

Auvra