Michelle Morgante: But why? Because questioning is good for us

The arguments were frequent in my teen years, and sometimes fierce.

I remember one night, standing in the kitchen as my mom tried to get dinner ready. I don’t remember what the fight was about. I only remember demanding: “Why? But, why?!”

“Because!” she replied, exasperated. “I’m the mother. And I say so!”

“But I just want to know why!”

All my mother could give me in response was a curse: “I hope, someday, you have a daughter just like you!”

I was, what some might call, a challenging teenager. That would be the generous term. Parents familiar with such battles, whether referring to a terrible 2-year-old or an obstinate teen, might have other terms: disrespectful, rebellious, disobedient, out-of-control.

My mother and I clashed often as I grew up. In so many ways, I felt she didn’t understand. As the years have passed, I came to believe that was, at least in part, true. But, in my mother’s defense, it wasn’t her fault. She had grown up in a different world. And, in all fairness, I wasn’t the only one in the dark.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I was able to see that my mother, who was born and raised in a small town in 1940s and ’50s Mexico, had grown up in a place and time very different from the California I knew. In her world, children respected their elders unquestioningly. One respected the rule of authority, whether that was your parents, your teachers, your priest or the president. There were no “Question Authority” bumper stickers or rebellious rockers stirring up the airwaves.

For many of us born to immigrant parents, we live in a clash of cultures – the one commanding our homes and the dizzying American one swirling around us. For some, the only real choice is to live by the rules set at home.

“We’re humble people, we first-generation Latinos,” Encarnacion Ruiz, director of admissions at UC Merced, told me during a recent conversation. “It’s a beautiful thing. But, it also works against us because we just accept things.”

Ruiz, a Valley native whose parents came from San Luis Potosi, Mexico, says children of immigrant parents can have a hard time adapting to the culture of academia, particularly that of a top-tier research institution where the idea of questioning accepted viewpoints is the whole point.

“You have to question it – everything,” he said. “That’s a researcher.”

Yet, parents – whether they are immigrants or not – often squelch our children’s persistent questions for the sake of expediency.

“As we all know, 2-year-olds ask, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ But we stifle that,” Ruiz said. And in doing so, over time, we can end up discouraging curiosity and the innate desire to seek explanations, he said.

With his own children, Ruiz aimed to encourage their questioning. “My parents might think they’re being disrespectful, but it’s a really important trait if you’re going to be successful in this country.”

If Ruiz could realize a dream by opening his own school, he would encourage students to raise questions, to challenge ideas.

“How do you teach people to ask questions? How do you create a culture that promotes the challenging of teachers? It’d make it more difficult for teachers ... but it’s good,” he said. “That’s how they learn.”

At a job interview once, the recruiter asked me a question that I’d never heard before: “If we were to ask your mother to describe you in one word, what would she say?” I’m sure I laughed, thinking about the arguments in the kitchen. One word came to mind.

“Stubborn,” I replied.

The recruiter, wearing his impeccable three-piece suit as he sat in the leather chair in New York City’s Yale Club, broke out in a smile. “Stubborn?! I like that.”

There are other words that might be used to describe a challenging teenager, words that are, indeed, more positive than those mentioned earlier: determined, strong-willed, dogged, persistent.

While such traits are almost always applied positively when speaking about boys, that’s not always the case with young women. Yet, I take heart in a phrase made famous by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a professor at Harvard: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

I can’t say that I’ve made history yet, but there’s time ahead still. In the meantime, as a solo mother, I’ve had to explain to the many caregivers who’ve been part of my family life that my philosophy of raising my boys can be tiresome.

When I need to steer my boys in a certain direction, I take time to explain the reasons. When they were small and I needed to put someone in timeout, I made it a time to have a conversation about why a behavior wasn’t acceptable.

I did my best to avoid declaring, “Because I said so.” It may not be the fastest way to bring someone in line, but I’ve hoped it is one that will inspire my boys to think through their decisions, or at least think before acting, without stamping out their innate desire to push boundaries.

So far, we’ve done OK. But, then again, who knows? I had three boys – not a daughter.

This story was originally published April 19, 2016 at 6:33 PM with the headline "Michelle Morgante: But why? Because questioning is good for us."