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Annie Reneau

Parenting

15 alternatives to asking 'How was school?' that will get kids talking about their day

Avoid the dreaded monosyllabic response with these engaging alternatives.

Photo credit: Canva

Sometimes kids just need to be asked the right questions at the right time.

Effective parenting is largely about communication, but sometimes communicating with kids is easier said than done. If you're a parent of a school-aged child, especially a tween or teen, you've likely had some version of this conversation more times than you can count:

"Hey, how was school today?"

"Fine."

"Just fine? Anything interesting happen?"

"Not really."

"Well, did you have a good day at least?"

"Yep."

The "How was school?" question inevitably leads to monosyllabic answers that feel more like an obligatory response rather than an actual, thoughtful answer. And yet we keep asking it because it's a reasonable question and we really want to know. We're not asking for a dissertation, so why don't kids open up when we ask them how school was? And how do we get them to do so?

According to child behavioral experts, the problem lies partially in the question itself.

"Often, we choose questions like 'How was school?' or 'How was your day?' Questions like that don’t give a child a place to start," says Kristi Budd, a school counselor at The Gordon School in Rhode Island. "They also don’t show a lot of thought or understanding on the part of the adult. Think about the different facets of your day, and how broad that question might seem."

Children's days are busy, just like ours. "A good rule of thumb is: could you answer the same question?" Budd says. "Or would it leave you wondering where to start?"

parenting, motherhood, fatherhood, kids, after school, communication Broad, vague questions can be overwhelming for any of us.Photo credit: Canva

Thoughtful questions come from thinking through a child's day, putting yourself in their shoes, and recognizing where there might be triumphs or trials they might like to share. What might your kid have been thinking about during recess? What might they have been feeling in class?

"Try asking questions that help your child reflect and express their feelings," suggests Irin Rubin, author of The MamaZen Parenting Method. "This not only gets them talking, it shows them that you truly value their inner world."

Another reason kids might be reticent to open up? The timing of the question, Dr. Shereen Mohsen, a clinical psychologist, tells Upworthy. If you try to ask them about their day right as you're picking them up from school, you'll probably get shut down, as kids need time to shift gears.

"A lot of times, kids just need to decompress," Mohsen says. "School takes up a lot of their energy—academics, friends, rules, social stuff—that by the time they’re home, they don’t want to rehash it all."

parenting, motherhood, fatherhood, kids, after school, communication Sometimes kids need a little time to decompress before they're ready to talk.Photo credit: Canva

Assuming they've had a little decompression time first, here are 15 alternative questions suggested by experts that might help kids open up about their day:

What was something that made you smile today?

Was there a moment you felt really proud of yourself?

What was tricky for you today, and how did you handle it?

Who did you feel most connected to at school?

Who do you want to get to know better?

What’s one thing you wish I could have seen you do today?

What is one thing that you enjoyed?

What was one thing that challenged you?

parenting, motherhood, fatherhood, kids, after school, communication Walking and talking can help. Photo credit: Canva

What was something that annoyed you today?

What surprised you?

What was the funniest thing that happened today?

Who did you sit with at lunch?

Was there a part of your day that felt really long or boring?

If you could do over one thing from today, which one would you pick?

Did anyone say something that made you laugh?

If your kids are older, don't expect as much sharing about the details of their day, and don't take it personally.

"For tweens and teens, keeping things to themselves is often more about independence than rejection," Mohsen says. "Staying curious without pushing too hard shows them you are there for them whenever they’re ready."

parenting, motherhood, fatherhood, kids, after school, communication Teens not wanting to open up to their parents is a normal phase.Photo credit: Canva

Budd suggests making sure teens have other trusted adults in their lives to open up to besides you.

"As your children approach high school, it is time to get your mind around the idea that they aren’t going to tell you everything," she says. "As a caregiver, it becomes more important that they have an adult—anyone—that they trust. It could be Aunt Cindy, it could be the librarian, it could be the school nurse. When your child is talking, listen to learn who the adults are in their life, and do what you can to encourage those relationships. It may break your heart to not be the only trusted adult in your child’s life, but you’re doing them a great service by making sure they have a team of grownups and not just one parent."

Getting kids to talk may seem harder than it should be, but with the right timing, questions, and expectations, the lines of communication can remain open and kids will know they can always come to you if and when they have things to share.

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The mystery of how 'American Idol' found the legendary Kelly Clarkson on its first try

One of the best singers of all time was just a needle in a haystack.

Photos: Public Domain

Kelly Clarkson has come a long way since her American Idol days.

Kelly Clarkson can literally sing anything. That's simply undisputed fact at this point, as the Pop Princess continues to wow the world on pretty much a weekly basis with her powerful vocals. The woman takes hard songs, makes them harder to sing, and then knocks them out of the park every time. She's more than earned her rank among the world's greatest singers, which is remarkable considering how she initially rose to fame.

Some of us are old enough to remember seeing Kelly Clarkson for the first time 24 years ago, when she was just a 20-year-old aspiring singer and cocktail waitress auditioning for a new TV show in a dress she made herself. American Idol promised to find America's best singer from among the masses, but surely the likelihood of that really happening was slim, right? It's funny now to look back and recall how that first season of American Idol went down. Obviously, people know Kelly Clarkson won, but what people might not know or remember is that she didn't really stand out among the competition at the very beginning.

- YouTube youtu.be

She was a very good singer, don't get me wrong. But she wasn't as polished as she is now and there were other good singers (shout out to Tamyra Gray) and performers with a certain "X factor" (hello, Justin Guarini) in that first season that made the show genuinely competitive. As executive producer Nigel Lythgoe told Billboard, Kelly Clarkson didn't really stand out until the top 10 started competing.

“Justin Guarini and Tamyra Gray—we all said right from the beginning—those two. Tamyra was going to win,” said Lythgoe. “Kelly didn’t come through. The only thing that stood out was her humor. It was only when we got into the top 10 that all of a sudden, [when Kelly sang] people would stand there open-mouthed.”

What did stand out was Clarkson's personality. She was funny, likeable, and down-to-earth with a charming Texas twang in her speech. But her voice began to shine more and more as she sang songs that showcased her powerhouse soprano range. We watched her get better and better every week until the top three when it became clear she was going to win the whole thing. Even when she was suffering from laryngitis and could barely talk, she knocked Celine Dion's "I Surrender" out of the park to make it to the top three.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

It's wild to look back now and realize we were literally watching a star be born. But of course, the show was brand new. No one knew whether winning American Idol would really make someone a star with staying power. As we've seen in the decades since, it's not a guarantee. Not even close.

Yet here we are, still marveling at Kelly Clarkson's voice that somehow still keeps getting better and better. With a discography of some 550 songs in addition to countless live performances and her popular "Kellyoke" covers that put every karaoke enthusiast to shame, she's proven she can sing anything. She's sung some of the most iconic and challenging songs like they were nothing.

Watch her hit—and sometimes exceed—other artists' famous high notes for nine minutes straight (or at least skip to minute 8:35 to see how she out-high-notes Celine Dion in "All By Myself"):

- YouTube www.youtube.com

One thing hasn't changed, despite nearly two and a half decades of fame and some very public personal struggles—Clarkson is still the funny, loveable girl with the slight southern accent who makes people feel right at home in her presence. There's a reason she has her own successful talk show. Somehow, through all these years of stardom, she's remained humble and kind, as evidenced by her fangirly reaction to Celine Dion's praise after she sang (and nailed, of course) Dion's "My Heart Will Go On."

- YouTube www.youtube.com

How did American Idol find this gem among all the potential singers in the country on its very first try? It's a mystery. But how lucky were they that she signed up for the audition (despite having no idea what she was auditioning for—she told Jimmy Fallon that she didn't even know it was a TV show until the third audition) and gave them a genuine superstar for their first winner. At this point, it's hard to say whether Clarkson should be thanking American Idol for providing her big break or whether they should be thanking her for making the show continuously relevant even when other winners' careers have fizzled.

She really does just keep getting better vocally, and we should all count ourselves lucky that we're here to witness it.

@kellyclarksonshow

Never Let Go 💙 #kellyoke #kellyclarkson #celinedion #titanic #cover

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Education

Carl Sagan's 1988 astronomy course had nothing to do with stars. The final exam is still relevant.

"He knew critical thinking was a skill needed to tackle the world's problems."

Public Domain/Library of Congress

Carl Sagan's Astronomy 490 class had little to do with astronomy, at least on the surface.

If you signed up for a college class called Astronomy 490, you'd likely expect it to be a high level study of the cosmos. It would focus on stars, planets, galaxies, black holes, perhaps delving deeper into theories of the world's greatest astrophysicists and cosmologists. Something having to actually do with the night sky at least, right?

Famed astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan offered Astronomy 490 at Cornell University as a senior seminar course in the 1980s, but it was nothing like what one might expect. The focus of the course wasn't stars, but "critical thinking in scientific and non-scientific contexts." The course used examples from Astronomy and other fields and case studies from the history of science as well as "borderline science and medicine, religion and politics." The idea was to help students across all fields of study to become better thinkers through logic and rhetoric and the scientific method.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Students had to be approved by Sagan in order to take the class, and they had to be "well-qualified" and prepared to "assimilate an extensive reading list" as well as participate in class discussions. The book list included textbooks on logic, reasoning, cooperation, and free thought, and class discussion topics ranged from world hunger to Affirmative Action to the Palestinian state.

The Library of Congress houses Sagan's handwritten course notes, which special curator and digital archivist Trevor Owens wrote, "include mention of the important balance between openness to new ideas and skeptical engagement with those ideas in science" and show how "he wanted to use student’s every day experience with things like television to prompt them to think more skeptically about how claims are made and warranted in everyday life."

TV, television, carl sagan, astronomy 490, critical thinking Critical thinking became even more important in the age of television. Giphy

But what was perhaps most interesting about the course is its final exam. Or rather, exams. The Library of Congress has course exams from 1986 and 1988, and they differ in what Sagan asked students to do. However, the purpose was the same: To prompt students to put to use all the critical thinking skills they had gained in the class.

In his 1986 final exam, Sagan asked students to do two thought exercises and write papers about them. The first was to comment on the pros and cons of this quote from George Bernard Shaw, written around 1921:

"Our credulity, though enormous, is not boundless; and our stock of it is quite used up by our mediums, clairvoyants, hand readers, slate writers, Christian Scientists, psycho-analysts, electronic vibration diviners, therapeutists of all schools registered and unregistered, astrologers, astronomers who tell us that the sun is nearly a hundred million miles away and that Betelgeuse is ten times as big as the whole universe, physicists who balance Betelgeuse by describing the incredible smallness of the atom, and a host of other marvel mongers whose credulity would have dissolved the Middle Ages in a roar of sceptical merriment. In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as one per cent of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific."


carl sagan, astronomy 490, critical thinking, final exam, college course First page of Carl Sagan's Astronomy 490 final exam in 1988.Library of Congress

The second part of the exam was to design and execute an experimental test of sun sign astrology (such as the daily horoscopes in the newspapers of the time). If that experiment found that evidence for sun sign astrology was poor, students were to explain its popularity. If the experiment found that evidence for sun sign astrology was fair, good, or excellent, students were to explain the scholarly disdain for it. In other words, they had to make the argument against whatever their experiment results were.

In the 1988 exam, students were asked to read "When Prophecy Fails," a short book about a UFO cult known as Clarionites (also Seekers) in the 1950s that had predicted that the end of the world would happen on December 21, 1954. Researchers followed the group to see what would happen when their predicted apocalypse didn't happen.

Sagan asked students to imagine they were part of that research team, but altered the scenario in two ways—adding a new charismatic leader rising up among the Clarionites and some natural disasters occurring on December 21, 1954.

UFO, cult, clarionites, when prophecy fails, end of the world sci-fi ufo GIF Giphy

Then he asked the students to do the following:

- Describe your best estimate of what might have happened as a result of these altered events over the next few years, informed by our readings and class discussions, including the Milgram experiments. [The Milgram experiments tested people's willingness or unwillingness to follow authority when it meant harming other people.]

- Compose a dialogue, taking place 34 years later (i.e.,now) between a believer in Clarionite intervention and a skeptic, making the best case possible for both points of view.

- What lessons, if any, can we draw?

Sagan clarified that there was no correct answer to either of the exam assignments. He simply wanted to see the students' critical thinking in action and for them to show what they'd learned with "coherency and cogency of argument."

carl sagan, astronomy 490, critical thinking, final exam, college course Second page of Astronomy 490 final exam from 1988.Library of Congress

What stands out about these exams is that they ask the students to make arguments on both sides of a controversial topic. After all, critical thinking isn't just about being skeptical or rejecting ideas in the name of science; it's also about being able to understand and construct the arguments someone would make on any side of an issue. If you understand someone's arguments well enough to create them yourself, they become much easier to deconstruct and point out the elements that don't makes sense.

In a time when people have a hard time agreeing on basic facts, conspiracy theories abound, expertise is under attack, and prejudices of all kinds easily cloud people's judgment, perhaps we can take Sagan's final Astronomy 490 goals to heart and work on sharpening our critical thinking skills.

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Woman builds an elaborate hotel in her yard for stray cats to stay cozy through the winter

People are calling it "Hotel Catifornia" and "The Fur Seasons."

Images via Canva

A woman in China provides a cozy home for stray cats in her neighborhood.

When winter comes around, people may wonder how stray animals stay warm and safe. Stray cats in particular are highly adaptable creatures and their home is the great outdoors, so most of the time there's not much that people need to do to protect them. But when temperatures dip to dangerous levels, caring humans naturally want to make sure strays have a place to go to get out of the harsh elements.

One woman has taken that desire to a whole new level with an elaborate cat apartment she built for the many stray cats in her neighborhood. We're not just talking about a shelter–it's like luxury hotel living for her feline friends. The apartment has multiple rooms, cushy blankets that get taken out and cleaned, and even a temperature-controlled water source so they're always able to find drinking water in frigid temps.

Check this out:

The woman who built the apartment actually lives in China and was sharing her videos on TikTok, but it seems her account has since been deactivated. This hasn't stopped people from talking about her and her impressive project, though. This thread on TikTok contains updates about the cat hotel from people finding and reposting the adorable story.

Welcome to the Meowtel Catifornia

Of course, the clever hotel jokes and puns started rolling in first thing:

'Welcome to the hotel catifornia."

"Such a lovely place."

"They can check out any time but they won't ever leave ^^"

"I prefer Hotel Calicofornia."

"Meowriott."

"Given my skill, mine would be more like Meowtel 6."

"Pawliday Inn.'

"The Fur Seasons."'

"Meowne Plaza."

People loved seeing the care and ingenuity she put into the "meowtel," as well as how happy the cats seem with the arrangement. In fact, some people were sure their own house cats would move out just to go live in this kind of cat commune.

"My cat just looked at me and sighed…"

"All the neighbours be looking for their cats and they’ve bailed to live at the kitty motel."

"They’d pack their little bags and move in without a second thought."

"They wouldn't even wait to pack their bags."

"Alright Carol it’s been real but we’re gonna head out. Found a great deal on a luxury apartment so yanno… take care."


Cats live where they want when they want

cats, stray cats, pet cats, felines, kitties Kitten snuggled in a person's arms. Image via Canva.

Those people may have been joking, but several others shared that their cats really did ditch them to go live with neighbors who had more desirable living situations.

"I’ve had two cats do this. One was annoyed at our second dog’s puppy energy so she moved in with an older lady a street over. We used to see her all the time until she passed. The other missed our kids being little so she moved next door where there’s a little girl. We talked to both neighbors and said if they get sick of them to let us know and we’ll take them back but both lived the rest of their lives with their new families."

"One of our cats moved next door because he loves children and wanted to be with the little girl next door. Because it’s a very small village, he goes to the school most days to wait for her and they come home together. School is 3 buildings away."

"We had a cat do the same thing about 20 years ago. She hated the barks of our new puppy and would put her paw on his mouth to try and stop it. One day, she slipped outside and I found her a month later, two streets over, hanging with a couple who didn’t have a dog. They said she just showed up at the door and moved in. I gave them all her cat food and hope she had a nice quiet life."

Is it a bad idea to feed and shelter stray cats?

cats, stray cats, feeding cats, feral cats, shelter cats Cats eating kibble on the street.Image via Canva

People have differing opinions about whether it's good to feed stray cats or not, as cats can cause problems for local wildlife and it's not great to encourage an increasing stray cat population. According to Catster, in the United States alone, an estimated four billion birds and 22 billion mammals (such as mice, voles, rabbits, and shrews) are killed annually by both domestic and stray cats. In Canada, cats are the number one of killer of birds, killing "between 100 and 350 million birds every year." These numbers are staggering, but the bird and small mammal populations can be protected if stray cats are cared for responsibly: namely, spaying and neutering those in your area to cut down on the population and finding homes for those who are friendly and comfortable with humans.

According to the Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon, here are the best practices for feral and stray cats:

- Spay/neuter to prevent additional litters

- Find homes for friendly cats

- Feed outdoor cats on a schedule

- Remove food & dishes when they are done eating

- Pick up scraps and keep the feeding area tidy

- Provide fresh water

- Provide a warm place for the cats to sleep

So, go ahead and care for those kitties and keep them warm through the winter—just make sure they can't make any more kittens.

This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.

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