Somewhere in America right now a mother is pulling out of a school parking lot with a child in the back seat, and she is asking, with real hope in her voice, how school was. And the child is saying...fine. Ugh, always fine.
Then mom is asking whether anything happened, and the child is saying not really, and she is looking in the rearview mirror at a person she made with her own body who has, in the space of a single stoplight, sealed himself off from her like a submarine hatch. It hurts and mothers everywhere are hoping for questions to break through that barrier.
I know this because I have been that mother roughly four thousand times, and because I have spent an equal number of afternoons on the other side of the transaction, as a teacher watching that same child leave my classroom having spent the previous fifty minutes arguing, laughing, getting something wrong on the board and getting it right the second time, and then walking into a parent's car and reporting that nothing occurred.
Here is the thing nobody tells you. The kid is not lying. "How was school?" is an impossible question. It asks a twelve-year-old to compress seven hours, six adults, and twenty peers into an adjective, and "fine" is the correct adjective. You asked a question the size of a house and got an answer the size of a house key. Kids answer the size of the question. Adults do too, which is why "how are you" at a cocktail party has never once produced information.
So the fix is not to ask harder or with more emotion. It's to ask smaller, and to ask about the things a middle schooler will actually talk about, which are, in descending order: other people's misfortunes, injustice, food, and, very occasionally, themselves.
In the car
You have three minutes and a tired person. Start with one small question.
Instead of "How was school?" ask what happened in science today. A single class has a single answer. Rotate the class. Within two weeks you will know which subject gets a paragraph and which gets a grunt, and the grunt is useful information you can return to later.
Instead of "Do you have homework?" ask what's due tomorrow and what's due Friday. The first version has two possible answers and both are one word answers. The second one reveals whether your child can see past tonight, which is the entire project of middle school. If Friday gets "I don't know," you have just learned what no report card will tell you until it's too late.
Instead of "Who did you sit with at lunch?" ask who made you laugh today. Lunch is a status question, and children can hear a status question the way dogs hear a whistle. Laughing is safe. You'll get a name and a story, and over a season you'll get a map of who your kid actually likes, as opposed to who he is managing.
Instead of "Did you get your test back?" ask what the teacher said when she handed it back. The grade is in the portal. You can look at it any time, and you do, and it's making neither of you happier. What isn't in the portal is the comment, the sigh, the "come see me at lunch." That's the part that predicts the next test.
At the dinner table
You have more time, more people, and, God willing, the phone is in another room.
Instead of "Anything happen today?" ask who got in trouble, and for what. I have never met a child who didn't have an answer to this and didn't want to give it. It is gossip, which is to say it is human. But listen to what's underneath the story: the actual rules of that classroom, which teacher runs a tight ship and which one has already lost the room by October, and where your own kid stands in relation to the line. Children narrate other people's discipline with tremendous precision. It is the one subject on which they are reliable witnesses.
Instead of "How's math going?" ask what they're doing in math this week. "Going" invites a grade. "This week" invites a topic, and topics tell you about pacing. Same unit as a fortnight ago? Then either the class is stuck or your child is, and either way you now have something specific to put in a three-sentence email.
Instead of "Did you understand it?" say teach it to me, you've got a minute. "Understand" is a yes-or-no question and the answer is always yes, delivered with the serene confidence of someone who has not been tested yet. Teaching it back is the test. The holes appear inside thirty seconds. It also happens to be the most effective study technique known to cognitive science, and you've just deployed it over spaghetti while pretending to be dumb.
Instead of "What did the teacher say?" ask what a teacher said today that surprised you. Kids remember the surprising thing. Sometimes it's a fact. Sometimes it's a joke you'd rather not have heard. Sometimes it's a policy you didn't know existed, and now you do.
Why these work best
Every question is small enough to have one answer. Most of them are about someone else, which is where children are comfortable. Several point at the near future, which is where a middle schooler's problems actually live. And nearly all of them require retrieval, not rating. You are asking the kid to go and get something, and what he brings back has a story stuck to it.
Two more things. Do not fix anything in the car. The moment a real answer is met with advice, the child learns that answering costs something, and he will stop paying. And let the silence sit. The second answer, the one you were actually after, arrives about ten seconds after you stop talking. Every parent I know fills that ten seconds. Don't.
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