For reasons I cannot explain, the last few days have been filled with conversations about bad questions.  Yes, there is such a thing.  And it’s an actual problem in a world overflowing with opinions, ideas, suggestions, critiques, and so on.

Bad questions exist in every imaginable domain of human life:  in the intimacy of families, in workplaces, on debate stages, in classrooms, parliaments, city councils, school boards, on street corners, in cultural spaces, and so on.  Literally everywhere and anywhere human beings can be found, questions follow.

Years ago, I observed that my husband kept asking our autistic son “yes” or “no” questions.  I had long before realized that asking those questions generated a totally unreliable response.  Typically, our son gave an answer that was the last option offered, so if you switched the order of “yes” and “no” you changed the answer.  But he didn’t change his mind.

So I worked to get my husband instead to ask open-ended questions.  That was a big leap for a child who struggled mightily with things that are not concrete. You could show him a color, but how do you explain what ‘why’ means? I plugged away at this for years and years.  It was a process. Instead of asking, “Do you want this?” and generating a “yes” or “no,” I worked with my husband to shift the question to “Which one do you want?” hoping to elicit a sentence like “I want…”

With why questions, which I knew my son had an incredibly hard time understanding, I spent........

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