Comments on: Look it up!

By: amysue

amysue — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 01:19:55 +0000

Nah. I have a 9 and a 12 year old and I either tell them the answer or we look it up together. I always thought that if they don’t know, then asking me is one way they could find out and looking it up another but in either case the answer is what it is (although I often point out to my kids that my answers are not to be assumed to be infallible).

And it goes both ways-I often ask my kids what something means and if they don’t know we figure it out together. The most recent example was my utter befuddlement when my 12 year old daughter asked me to not get “all in my grill”. ??? This has since led to her mortification as I now try and incorporate as much current slang into my chats with her as possible and she keeps correcting my usage or choice of words (”No!It’s all up in my kool-aid, not my crystal lite!”) Heh.

By: Julia

Julia — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:51:39 +0000

I got the “look it up” from about age 10 on.

Then I took German. And then I took Latin. And once I had both some German and some Latin under my belt, my mother (MA in linguistics) would talk me through figuring out the meaning of the word etymologically. After about the 5th time, I just went to the frakkin’ dictionary on my own if I needed the meaning of a word.

If it wasn’t just a word, my father would help me through reasoning it out, help me look it up in whatever book we had that had the information, or do his best to explain it. (MS in either applied math or theoretical physics, not quite sure exactly which.) My father was cool. He let me stay up to watch “L.A. Law” with him sometimes, and never argued that I had to go to bed if the baseball game on TV was still going.

By: Keira

Keira — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:15:27 +0000

I often got the “look it up”. I was frustrated often and early on as a child with this and many other stock answers from parenthood. To me it was dismissive of my curiosity and of me as a person. I would have prefered to look it up with the parent and discussed it. The other answer that frustrated me was when they gave me the definition as an afterthought, not even asking why I wanted to know, or acknowledging me.

By: oracle_tx

oracle_tx — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:12:13 +0000

My folks would usually tell me to look it up, but they would help with the process if I couldn’t find it. That stage didn’t last long, since usually my questions were more complex than just a word or I would just figure it out from the context and move on.

If/when I become a parent, my answer will be “Let’s go look it up!”, and as they mature I’ll have them do more of the looking.

By: Tam

Tam — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:18:43 +0000

“Look it up” can also be a reaction from a frustrated parent who is tired of doing things for the child that the child is capable of doing themselves.