Dear Dad and Mom,
When I grow up, I want to be like you. That is why I ask why so often. I want to learn; I need to understand how the world around me works, how things work. Why does one person act one way and others another? Why do some people dislike soup when I love it? And if I ask you, it is because I trust you, because I know that just as you gave me life, you will give me all the answers I need. That is why I come to you with my whys. If you shut me down, if you say, “Because I say so,” “Here you go again with your questions,” or “I don’t know,” with no intention of finding the answer, you let me down. I will still love you just as much, but I will look for those answers somewhere else, because my questions have not been answered by the people I believed in most in the world: you. The answers I find elsewhere may not be the most suitable ones, but they will satisfy my curiosity for the moment. In the future, I will ask you fewer and fewer questions, not because my curiosity has faded—no, my curiosity will remain intact—but because I will already have found the answers outside our home.
If you want to give me the tools I need to deal with the problems of today and tomorrow, be patient with me. Look deep within your subconscious for the answers you would have liked to receive when you were little and faced situations you did not understand. That way, you will strengthen my confidence, nourish my curiosity, and give me everything I need to work out my own answers to the whys I have now and those still to come.
Because I love you with all my heart.
P.S. This letter is addressed to all those parents I have come across in life who unknowingly clip their children’s wings by being unable to answer their whys. That was not my experience: when my parents did not know something, they looked it up or made it up, just so I would stop asking questions, even for a little while.
“Humor and curiosity are the purest form of intelligence.”
Roberto Bolaños