What Your 6-Year-Old Loses in Their First Year of School (And How to Protect It)
For parents of children aged 5–7. Because school will build one thing in your child. Your job is to build the other.
Before school, your child asked you why the sky changes colour. Why dogs don’t talk. Why we can’t live on the moon. Why Tuesday comes after Monday. Why some people are sad.
They asked because they wanted to know. Not because a teacher told them to. Not because there was a test. Not because there was a reward for asking. They asked because the world was strange and magnificent and full of gaps their mind wanted to fill. The questions came from inside — wild, relentless, illogical, beautiful. They asked you things that had no answer. And then they asked you why there was no answer.
That was curiosity in its purest form. Your child, reaching inside for their next thought. Generating questions rather than waiting for them.
You may have noticed — gradually, and then unmistakably — that the questions are slowing down.
Not disappearing. Not yet. But the child who once asked seventeen unanswerable questions between breakfast and the car is now asking fewer. And the questions they do ask are changing in character. They’re becoming narrower. More practical. More answerable. More like the questions school rewards.
“Is this right?” “What’s the answer?” “What are we supposed to do?”
If you’ve noticed this, you are not imagining it. You are watching something happen that has been documented by researchers for decades. And it is one of the most important — and least discussed — transitions of early childhood.
The shift no one prepares you for
Here is what is happening, plainly.
Your child is entering an environment that is structured around answers. School — any school, even an excellent one — operates on a fundamental mechanism: the teacher asks a question, the child provides the correct answer, and the correct answer is rewarded. This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. It is how curriculum works. It is how thirty children in a room can learn simultaneously. It is how reading is taught, how maths is practised, how knowledge is transmitted from one generation to the next.
The problem is not that this system exists. The problem is what it quietly, unintentionally trains out of the child who enters it.
A child who has spent five years generating questions from within — questions that had no right answer, no external reward, no source other than their own wondering mind — is now spending six hours a day in an environment where the questions come from outside, the answers come from outside, and the reward comes from outside. The direction of the child’s thinking is being reversed. Not through malice. Through structure.
Susan Engel, a developmental psychologist at Williams College who has spent decades studying curiosity in children, documented one of the most revealing findings on this exact phenomenon. In her book The Hungry Mind and the observational research behind it, she and her team recorded the questions children asked in classrooms — both questions prompted by teachers and questions that arose spontaneously from the children themselves. What they found was striking: in a typical primary school classroom, the number of spontaneous, curiosity-driven questions from students was vanishingly small — often just a handful across an entire observation period.
These were the same children who, at home, asked their parents dozens of questions an hour. The curiosity wasn’t gone. It had simply learned where it was welcome and where it wasn’t.
Engel’s research points to something subtle but profound: children learn very quickly what a classroom values. They learn that the teacher’s questions are the ones that matter. They learn that the right answer is more valued than an interesting question. They learn that wondering aloud — the kind of tangential, unpredictable, sometimes inconvenient wondering that is the engine of curiosity — disrupts the flow of the lesson.
They learn to stop.
Not because anyone tells them to stop. Because the structure communicates, clearly and consistently, that the child’s own questions are not what this environment is designed for.
What curiosity actually is — and why it matters more than you think
We use the word “curiosity” so casually that it’s easy to forget what it actually is. It is not a pleasant personality trait. It is not the characteristic of “bright” children. It is a foundational cognitive capacity — the capacity to generate questions rather than wait for them. The capacity to look at the world and think: I don’t understand this, and I want to.
This matters because of what it produces. A child who is curious is a child who is practising, every time they wonder, the habit of reaching inside for their next thought. They are not waiting to be told what to think about. They are not waiting for a prompt, a question, a direction from outside. They are generating the direction from within.
This is the same capacity that, at 8, becomes the ability to stay engaged with a problem when the answer isn’t obvious. The same capacity that, at 10, becomes the ability to question claims rather than absorb them. The same capacity that, at 15, becomes the ability to sit with ambiguity and not reach for the first available certainty.
Curiosity is not a stage children pass through. It is the foundation of every other capacity a mind can develop. And between ages 5 and 7, it is the capacity most at risk.
Lev Vygotsky, the developmental psychologist whose work on children’s learning has shaped modern education, described the relationship between a child’s questions and their cognitive development as inseparable. The child’s questions are not incidental to their thinking — they are the thinking. When a child asks “why does the moon follow the car?” they are not simply seeking information. They are constructing an understanding of the world — one question at a time, from the inside out. The quality of their questions reflects the quality of their developing mind.
When the questions stop coming — or when they narrow to “what’s the right answer?” — it is not just the questions that have changed. The direction of the child’s thinking has changed. From inside-out to outside-in. From generating to retrieving. From wondering to waiting.
This is not about blaming school
We want to be precise about this, because it matters.
School is not the enemy. School does something that no home can do: it gives a child structured access to knowledge, to social experience, to the practice of being one person among many. A good school builds literacy, numeracy, social skills, and a hundred other capacities that a child needs. We are not suggesting you homeschool your child or look for an alternative. We are not suggesting your child’s school is failing them.
We are saying that school builds one thing and a parent must build another.
School builds the child’s capacity to receive and apply knowledge that comes from outside. This is valuable. The child needs it.
But the child also needs the capacity to generate knowledge from inside — to ask questions that have no answer, to wonder without direction, to reach into their own mind and find something there. This capacity is not on any curriculum. No school has the structure to build it in a room of thirty children, because it looks different in every child, and it cannot be standardised, and it does not produce a measurable outcome on any test.
It can only be built at home. In the small moments. Five minutes a day. And the parent who builds it is not supplementing school — they are completing something that school, by its nature, cannot complete.
What the first year of school actually changes
Between ages 5 and 7, three specific shifts happen in a child’s relationship with their own thinking. Each one is natural. Each one is necessary. And each one, if left unaddressed, narrows the child’s interior life in ways that compound.
The child learns that answers come from outside.
Before school, the child’s primary source of information was their own experience, their own observation, their own questions. They encountered the world directly and made sense of it from the inside.
At school, they encounter a new arrangement: the teacher has the answers. The book has the answers. The correct response exists somewhere outside the child, and the child’s job is to find it and reproduce it. This is an efficient way to transmit knowledge. It is also, if it is the only mode the child practises, a way of training the child to look outward for everything.
The counter-practice at home: ask your child questions that have no right answer. Not quiz questions. Not “what did you learn today?” Questions that require them to generate something from within.
“If animals could talk, which animal do you think would have the most interesting things to say?”
“Why do you think we dream?”
“If you could invent a new colour, what would it look like?”
These questions do not teach the child anything in the traditional sense. They do something more important: they preserve the habit of reaching inside. The child who is asked one unanswerable question a day — at dinner, in the car, at bedtime — maintains the neural habit of generating their own thinking, even as school trains them to receive someone else’s.
The child learns that questions have answers.
This sounds obvious. But for a 4-year-old, many of the best questions do not have answers. “Why does the moon follow the car?” is not a question seeking information — it is a question exploring a mystery. The child is comfortable with not knowing. They are dwelling in wonder for its own sake.
School changes this relationship. At school, every question posed has an answer. The answer is known by the teacher. The answer can be found in the book. The answer exists. The child who once wondered without needing resolution now begins to expect that every question has a destination. And when they encounter a question that doesn’t — when the world presents them with ambiguity, uncertainty, genuine complexity — they become uncomfortable. Because they have been trained to expect the answer, and the answer isn’t there.
The counter-practice at home: sit in the not-knowing with your child. When they ask you something you don’t know, resist the instinct to look it up immediately.
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
That sentence — simple, honest, unhurried — teaches the child that not-knowing is not a problem to solve. It is a space to think in. A space to wonder in. The child who practises being in not-knowing at 6 is the child who can tolerate ambiguity at 16 — when the questions that matter most have no clear answers and the ability to sit with complexity is the thing that separates someone who reasons from someone who panics.
The child learns that being wrong is bad.
Before school, there was no wrong. A 4-year-old who says the moon is following the car is not wrong — they are interpreting. A 4-year-old who draws a purple sun is not making an error — they are creating. The concept of “wrong” barely exists in a pre-school child’s relationship with the world.
School introduces “wrong” as a central concept. Answers are right or wrong. Spellings are correct or incorrect. The maths has one answer. The reading has one pronunciation. For the first time in the child’s life, their output is evaluated against a standard — and found to be correct or not.
This is necessary. A child must learn to spell, to read, to compute. Accuracy matters. But the side effect — the one that is never named — is that the child begins to associate risk with being wrong. They begin to avoid situations where they might not succeed. They begin to narrow their attempts to the things they know they can do. The wild, experimental, mistake-rich exploration of the pre-school years gives way to a more cautious approach: do what you know. Stay where it’s safe. Don’t risk the wrong answer.
Carol Dweck’s research on mindset has documented this shift with precision. She found that children who are taught — through the structure of evaluation, not through anyone’s explicit instruction — that their worth is connected to their correctness begin to avoid challenge. Not because they can’t do hard things, but because hard things carry the risk of being wrong, and being wrong carries a cost they’ve learned to fear.
The counter-practice at home: celebrate the wrong answer. Not with forced enthusiasm — children see through that instantly. With genuine interest.
“That’s not the answer the book gives. But it’s an interesting answer. How did you get there?”
That question treats the child’s thinking as valuable even when the output is incorrect. It says: the process of thinking matters, not just the product. Over time, this builds something that school cannot build: a child who is willing to try things they might fail at. A child who sees being wrong not as a verdict but as information. A child who stays in the game when the game gets hard — because being wrong is not a reason to leave.
The five-minute counter-habit
Everything we’ve described — the three shifts, the three counter-practices — can be addressed in five minutes a day. Not five minutes of structured curriculum. Not five minutes of “learning activities.” Five minutes of a parent and a child, together, doing the one thing school cannot do: wondering.
One question a day with no right answer. Asked with genuine curiosity, not as a test. Received with patience, not with evaluation. Followed, if the child wants to follow it, wherever it leads. And left unresolved, if the child arrives at no conclusion — because the practice is in the reaching, not the arriving.
This is not a supplement to school. It is a complement to school. School builds the child’s capacity to receive knowledge. This practice builds the child’s capacity to generate it. School teaches the child how to find the answer. This practice teaches the child what to do when there is no answer to find.
Together, they build a complete mind. A mind that can learn from others and think for itself. A mind that can follow instructions and generate its own direction. A mind that can succeed within structure and thrive without it.
What you’re really protecting
Your child’s curiosity is not a trait you need to create. At 5, at 6, at 7, it is already there — wild and alive and looking for any excuse to engage. The questions haven’t stopped coming because the curiosity has died. They’ve slowed because the child is learning, from six hours a day of structure, that the world runs on answers, not questions.
Your five minutes a day is not adding curiosity to your child. It is protecting the curiosity that was already there. It is keeping the habit of reaching inside alive during the years when everything around the child is teaching them to reach outward.
This protection matters more than it seems. Because the child who reaches 9 with their curiosity intact — who still generates questions from within, who can still sit with not-knowing, who still sees being wrong as information rather than failure — is the child who has the foundation for everything that comes next. Frustration tolerance. Emotional regulation. Critical reasoning. Metacognition. Self-direction. Every one of these capacities depends, at its root, on the habit of looking inside rather than outside.
Curiosity is not one capacity among many. It is the first one. The one that makes the others possible. And between 5 and 7, it is the one most in need of a protector.
That protector is you.
Not the school. Not the curriculum. Not the app. You — asking one question a day that has no answer, sitting with your child in the wondering, and trusting that the reaching is the point.
A child who still wonders at 7 is a child with the most important foundation already in place. Not because wondering is charming, but because the habit of reaching inside — for a question, for an answer, for a thought that is entirely their own — is the habit that builds every capacity that comes after it.
School builds knowledge. Parents build the mind that knows what to do with it.
The world fills children. Parents build them.
And a child who still asks “why?” — not because they were told to, but because they cannot help it? That is a child whose foundation is holding.
About Neurry — Neurry builds strong minds in children ages 3–9 through daily screen-free practice between parent and child. Our free Wonder question gives your child one question every day that no AI can answer and no textbook contains — because the answer has to come from inside. neurry.com