Stop asking 'how was school' — ask this instead

I asked "how was school" for four years and got "good" or "fine" nearly every time. It is not that my kids were hiding things. The question is just too big to answer standing in a kitchen holding a backpack.

What actually works is specific and slightly strange: "what made you laugh today" and "what was the most boring part of today." Both questions are small enough to answer immediately, and both accidentally surface real information — the laugh question tells me who their friends are this month, and the boring question tells me which subjects are losing them.

The timing matters as much as the question. I stopped asking in the car, where eye contact makes some kids clam up, and started asking at snack time, side by side at the counter, no eye contact required. The information that used to take a week of prying now comes out unprompted within the first five minutes home.

None of this is a trick to extract secrets. It's just recognizing that "how was school" is a hard question dressed as an easy one, and kids, like adults, answer easy questions more honestly than hard ones.