The Duchess of Cambridge visited a garden this week to make pizza with school kids (as you do), when one of them asked her: “Does the Queen eat pizza?”
It’s not something many people have asked before – and Kate admitted she didn’t know the answer – but did promise she’d ask the queen next time she saw her, saying: “It’s a good question.”
Does she? Does Her Maj ever completely go to town on a Domino’s after a hard day of ruling? Does she have a go-to order for big events like the Strictly final? Has she ever had that weird one from Pizza Express with the hole in the middle? (And if so, will she ever make that mistake again?)
Children are full of questions, from the mundane (“Do you have a tail?”) to the profound (“Where do thoughts come from?”). From the silly (“Why can’t I eat poo?”) to the deeply offensive (“Why is that man so fat?”). You can’t fault them really – they’re figuring the world out, so asking the man in the estate agents if he has a vagina is just one more way of learning.
Most parents will have stories about their kids seeing someone who looks different, and choosing to immediately question why that person is in a wheelchair, has different coloured skin to them, or is dressed in a certain way. So what do you do? Die a little inside, conjure up a super-positive answer (“I don’t know, but isn’t it shiny?”) and have a more in-depth conversation about how different people are later.
There are questions that just have no sensible answers – like when that four-year-old asked his dad whether the sun melts ghosts. Are ghosts meltable? Could a sun melt a ghost? We just don’t know.
“Dad, how would the policeman feel if the horse licked him? Would the horse go to prison?”
And there’s plenty more where that came from – one Reddit user was woken by her son, prying open her eyelids to urgently ask: “Mummy, do cats have jobs?” In the same thread, another recalled his child looking at a mounted police officer and asking: “Dad, how would the policeman feel if the horse licked him? Would the horse go to prison?”, the answer to which (“probably fairly nice, and no”) isn’t satisfying in the slightest.
Certain areas are perpetually fascinating to children, and by ‘certain areas’ we of course mean genitals. One mother, speaking to Bustle, recounts her four-year-old son asking: “When will I grow tall enough to lick my penis?”.
Another mum named Charlotte joined in on a Facebook thread of mums sharing their weird questions, and explained her daughter asked, in a public toilet: “Mummy, why do you have a beard on your bottom?”
Finally, please spare a thought for another guy on Reddit, whose desire to educate his son about the birds and the bees led to the worst question a father could ever be asked in public: “On our way to watch my daughter play football, my son was asking me about how babies were made – I told him all about the sperm and they egg and so on. He seemed to reflect deeply about what I had said. We get to football and sit among all the other parents and he blurts out ‘Dad, is your sperm still inside me?’ I almost fucking died.”