Who Made This?: When Your Child Asks and You Have No Answer Ready
Breakfast. Your toddler or preschooler holds the cup up over the cereal and asks, "Who made this?" You say the store. "Who made the store?" You say some people. "Which people?" The toast pops. You have no idea who made the cup, or the toaster, and your child is waiting with the cup still in the air.
Somewhere around three or four, for many children, questions change shape. "What's that?" turns into "Who made that?" That shift is your child beginning to see the cup as a thing a person decided to make, not a thing that was always there. You do not need the factory. "A person did" is true, and it is the answer that matters. The people I have spent more than 20 years with, the ones who make new things for a living, mostly remember a day when a chair stopped being furniture and became something somebody made.
What Kit does
In Kit Meets Sparks, Kit trips on a box in the garage, a lightbulb rolls out, and POP, out comes a fairy made of gears and light. "Hello! I'm SPARKS!" Her super power: "I GLOW when I'm happy and I love things that are MADE." She zooms to the bicycle. "Someone MADE that!" The hammer. "And THAT!" Kit wants a turn and points at a rock. "Is it made? NO!" Sparks laughs so hard she falls off the shelf. Then Kit points at a web up high, and Sparks looks closer: "YES! A SPIDER made it!" The child listening waves to Sparks, squints at her glow, wiggles spider-leg fingers, and points at something made in their own room to say it with Kit: "Someone MADE that!"
This coloring page comes from Kit Meets Sparks. The full story (and the rest of the activities) is in the book.
What you can try
- Try the short true answer and stop there: "A person made it. Probably a lot of people." If the next question comes, it comes. You answered the one you were asked.
- Ask it back: "Who do YOU think made it?" The book's talk page says there is no wrong guess. A grandma, a robot, a bird. Say "Maybe" and keep eating.
- When the questions land in the checkout line, three people behind you, and you truly do not know: "I don't know. Let's find out." Then let it go. Most of the time they will not come back to it. If they do, you have the drive home.
Where the coloring page fits
The free pack has four coloring pages, Hello, Sparks!, the spider web, Sparks on Kit's nose, and Mia's red ball, plus two games: Grown or Made? and a Someone Made That! Walk. On a morning when the who-made-it questions come faster than your coffee, the page puts the question on the table in a form you can handle: the web was made by a spider, the ball was made by a person, and your child gets to be the one who decides.
Kit pointed at a rock. "Not the rock, Kit. That's just a rock."
More for this book
- The book: Kit Meets Sparks (Book 2)
- All 20 STEM picture books for toddlers and preschoolers
- Free coloring pages for all 20 books
- Blog: More parent moments
Sources
- Kit Meets Sparks: A Magical New Friend, Book 2 of Kit's Little Sparks.
- Free coloring and activity pack for Book 2 (8 pages, PDF, no sign-up).
Chris Kuczynski is an engineer turned registered patent attorney, a preschool co-founder, and a dad. He is the author of Kit's Little Sparks, a 20-book STEM series that gives children ages 2 to 4 the social and emotional foundations of the inventor's mindset. It is the first of four age-tiered series for readers ages 2 to 12.
Written by Chris Kuczynski
