“Are we going to Monster Jam?”
“Yes, Eli.”
Five minutes pass.
“Are we going to Monster Jam?”
“Yes, Eli.”
We are, for the record, going to Monster Jam. We have been going since the tickets went on sale six months ago, which means I have now confirmed our attendance somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand times. At dinner. At bedtime. In the car. Mid-sentence about something else entirely.
What I used to hear
For a long time I heard that loop the way most people would: as a glitch. A record stuck in a groove. I answered patiently, but somewhere in me was the tired question every parent of a kid like mine has asked — why does he keep asking when he knows?
If you’re in that place right now, I understand it. The thousandth repetition of anything wears on a person, and nobody warned you about this one.
What I saw when I finally watched his face
Then one day I actually watched his face when the yes landed.
He lights up. Every time. The thousandth yes hits him exactly like the first.
It was a little jolt of pure anticipation — six months of Christmas Eve, administered in daily doses. He wasn’t asking because he doubted the answer. He was asking because the answer felt good, and he’d found a button that dispensed it.
Most of us get to enjoy looking forward to something a few times: when we book it, the week before, the night before. My son had figured out how to live inside the looking-forward, every day, on purpose. He wasn’t stuck in a loop. He was savoring.
Making the unknown known
Once I saw that, I noticed the questions were doing a second job.
Before a family trip, the daily question changed format. It became a roll call: “Carter coming?” “Yes, Eli.” “Drew coming?” “Yes, Eli.” Every brother, every name, every day. He wasn’t confirming travel plans. He was confirming that his whole world was coming with him.
He also found videos of the hotel and studied them like film, narrating the inventory to anyone nearby: they have a bed, they have couches, they have a pool. By the time we arrived, it wasn’t a strange place. It was somewhere he’d already visited a hundred times.
Clinicians use the word priming for a version of this: previewing a new situation before it happens so it arrives already familiar. Nobody taught it to my son. His own system worked out what it needed — make the unknown known before you get there — and quietly built the tool. From the outside it looks like repetition. From the inside, it’s a child engineering his own certainty in a world that gives him very little.
Other reasons families describe
Every child is different, and our son’s reasons won’t be every child’s. Families and clinicians describe others too:
- Reassurance when anxious. Hearing the same answer again can settle a worry that hasn’t gone away.
- Predictability. A question with a known answer is a small piece of the day that goes exactly as expected.
- Connection. For a child who finds conversation hard, a familiar question is a reliable way to start one.
What helped us
- Answer the same way, every time. The sameness is the gift. A new answer, a joke, or “I already told you” changes the thing he came for.
- Watch your tone more than your words. Our son reads the emotional weather of a room better than anyone in it. A tired “yes” lands differently from a warm one, even when the word is the same.
- Notice when the question changes character. Joyful repetition and anxious repetition sound almost identical and mean very different things. When his asking turned faster and tighter, it was sometimes the early part of a hard afternoon — the kind of build we learned to watch for.
- Give the preview. Videos of the place, the names of who’s coming, the order of what happens. If a question is his way of mapping the future, a map helps.
This is one family’s experience, not professional advice. If repetitive questions come with distress that doesn’t settle, or start to crowd out everything else in your child’s day, it’s worth talking with the people on your child’s team.
“Are we going to Monster Jam?”
Yes, Eli. We’re going.
Ask me again in five minutes.