They’ll never ask the “hard” questions or be interested in anything complex? I’d like to provide you with a wonderful example of why that’s not true. Let me walk with you through a discussion I’m in the middle of with Azura (our 11 year old) today.
It started out simply and innocently enough, with us being in the same room together as the end of A Baby Story being on. We both watched as the mom delivered a very cute little baby boy, and the show visiting the family 4 weeks later. Azura said, I’d love to have either twins or a little boy when I have kids. I said something about genetics and how that can play a part in twins and mentioned how she might just end up with boys because she’s only one of 2 girls out of 9 grandchildren. I said how the odds looked good for having a boy, but that genetics isn’t that simple.
That simple comment led to her asking why not? We spent most of the last hour talking about how on paper it looks cut and dried how people pass down inherited traits and genes, but that it’s far from that simple. That parents pass down 23 chromosomes each and that those are made up of their genetic codes so in reality they’re passing down loads of information. And that every time those parents have a child, they’re calling new “data” from their respective gene pool. That just because on paper it looks like you have a 75% chance of having brown eyes because one of your parents do, doesn’t actually mean that is what’s going to happen every time! We had both actually read that statistic in a math-related book a couple of days before and neither one of us thought it was true.
Our family is the perfect experiment source for this 
With the exact same gene pool and the exact same set of parents, we’ve had a green eyed child (blue at birth), a blue eyed child (from birth), a brown eyed (from birth) child and a brown eyed child (blue at birth). That’s from a green eyed and brown eyed set of parents. Though, back one step, and it gets more complex because there are light and dark eyed grandparents, one set of light eyed having brown eyed children, the other set being brown and green having a green eyed child.
So we made a nifty little diagram showing how it’s not “really” 75% in our family. Which led to the discussion of dominant and recessive genes. And then we started talking about racism, and how it’s silly when you get right down to it, the belief that one genetic skin colour is better or worse than another, if we could in theory, no matter which belief system you hold, all share the same original gene pool. So the thought that one is better or worse than the other is just plain stupid, because we’d all share some common genes from a common gene pool.
We talked about ancestral DNA and how there’s a project right now that’s tracing ancestral DNA to trace the world’s population’s migrations.
That still didn’t answer why 75% of the kids in the house do NOT have brown eyes, so we took it to the Internet. There we found a site that explained all about eye colour and genes and how there’s not just the two genes we all know about, there’s even more and that those genes don’t even begin to explain the variants of different colours, like gray or purple or aqua. We found that it’s NOT a brown and a blue eyed gene, but actually a brown and GREEN eyed gene that determines eye colour. And, that we can actually explain the statistical probability why the kids have green, blue, brown and brown eyes respectively. There’s actually a genetic make up that explains that. We found out exactly what genes of the two known ones, Andrew and I would have to possess to have children with the eye colours they have. And that statistically, the next child would more than likely have brown eyes, since it’s a 50% 25% 25% chance. There was a call to Grandma asking what colour eyes she and Grandpa have, and what colour eyes THEIR parents had and that got added to our chart, and we could tell where the dominant brown gene came from and all agreed the green gene we all have is pretty darn strong!!!
We did more than that too. We were looking into DNA sequencing and what happens with genetic abnormalities and what causes them. That Azura is 1.5 million micrometres tall, but the diameter of the human genome is only 6 micrometres and that it would be 6/10000th’s of a centimetre. So it’s pretty damn small! And that each chromosome can carry hundreds of genes. We have no idea what they all do!
There’s so much more we did I can’t even remember it to write down. The other kids came and went and peeked into what we were doing and asked some questions about what we were doing too. I sure learned stuff I’ve never thought of or knew before then. I always thought, and was taught, that it’s a dominant brown eyed gene and a recessive blue eye gene, but it’s not. And it was actually kind of fun to see that hey, look at that, genetics actually does explain our genetic pool and not only that, we can extrapolate what genes we probably carry when it comes to eye colour
I should mention, none of this was given as a lesson. Azura easily could have said and did say that her curiosity and questions were satisfied. It wasn’t for the “lesson” but she learned but it also would have been perfectly okay if she didn’t (though how she couldn’t is beyond me). I was there, helping her to get as much or as little information as she wanted, and to stop, when she was done getting that accomplished, with no ulterior motives. She could have said no thanks I’m not interested and that would have been okay.
It all started from a simple question but the point was, we don’t “make” the kids do anything like that, and yet they have an unstoppable appetite for learning new things, even the “hard” and “complex” things! In fact, they don’t find them hard or complex, instead, they’re just another thing to figure out and explore.
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