What is the answer to the question"where did the first mommy come from" for a 5 yr old?

May 5, 2009 6:32 PM

What do I answer my 5 yr olds question about "if everyone comes from mommy's belly, where did the first mommy come from?" I have no idea what the answer is...adults or kids. At some point in evolution a baby was born...from what??? I don't do the whole God/creationism thing so please none of that garbage. Thanks!
posted by aacheson to education (36 comments total)

this is not meant to be a snarky answer AT ALL, but I had this SAME conversation with a friend a few days ago, and we just googled "explaining evolution to kids" and ton of resources came up. Beware, there's a lot of creationist stuff that comes up about how to explain it away... As I recall, she found the best stuff on wired.com's "geek dad" area, which looks like it's the first retrun in the google search.
posted by lalalana at 6:38 PM on May 5

Ha ha. I tried to explain evolution to my six year old during a similar conversation, and it was not productive. Finally I just said "It was so long ago that you won't be able to count that high until you're in middle school" and she said "Okay!" and that was that.

Yes, this is a nonanswer. I am generally a believer, with kids, in answering the question they ask without going into detail unless they want more, but sometimes they throw curves like this where the actual answer is beyond their comprehension. In this case, i think a nonanswer is not inappropriate, given that a real answer will cause undue frustration for everyone involved.
posted by padraigin at 6:38 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]

Reverse the order--Earth came from gases in space,very small creature came about fish, amphibians, dynosaurs, mammals, monkeys, people.

Going back on his direction is too hard.
posted by Ironmouth at 6:38 PM on May 5 [3 favorites]

I would read Born with a Bang with him. This book is a little over the head of 5 year olds in that you will mostly be looking at the pictures and talking about them with him, but I think it is a nice introduction to where things come from. I like how the universe has a voice and is telling its own story about how it came to think about itself.

If you like that one you could move onto From Lava to Life or Mammals who Morph which actually might suit your question better.
posted by aetg at 6:40 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]

It's ok to say "I don't know" or "No one really knows yet"
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:42 PM on May 5 [9 favorites]

I finessed all this without consulting the apparently abundant literature. I said, in effect, "From something that was almost exactly like a mommy's belly, but just a little bit different. And that mommy came from something that was pretty much like a mommy's belly, only a little more different. And that mommy came from something that was kind of like a mommy's belly, only a little more different. And this happened over a really long time, so long nobody knows for sure who everybody was or how it all started. But it changed gradually, kind of like how the mountains turned into sand, but lots better!"
posted by Clyde Mnestra at 6:52 PM on May 5 [8 favorites]

The mammal-like reptiles laid eggs with leathery shells. The monotremes still do.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 6:54 PM on May 5

It's ok to say "I don't know" or "No one really knows yet"

Absolutely. Inventing twee, digestible, answers is what started all the rubbish that people still believe today. Either skirt the issue at the limit of their understanding, or tell them we don't know exactly how it happened.
posted by Brockles at 7:08 PM on May 5 [3 favorites]

Absolutely. Inventing twee, digestible, answers is what started all the rubbish that people still believe today.

Really? You've got a story about how all that rubbish started? Say, I wonder who first invented a twee, digestible answer . . .
posted by Clyde Mnestra at 7:13 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]

"There have always been mommies."

But really, your answer to this says alot about the philosophy you're imparting to your kids, so just say what you think.
posted by rhizome at 7:28 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]

> At some point in evolution a baby was born...from what???

I think that your little one may be satisfied with a less literal answer. "How mommy had you is kind of like how all animals have babies, and always have."

Granted, I'm assuming for you that it's easier to explain that "people are a type of animal" than explaining the concept of the evolution of mammals, which is apparently difficult for large segments of the population to buy. Okay, that sounded a little snarkier than I meant it to. I'm just saying that slime --> fish --> reptiles and birds --> mammals is not exactly obvious common sense, but the neighbor's dog having babies that we call puppies being kind of like mommy having babies might be graspable.
posted by desuetude at 7:28 PM on May 5 [2 favorites]

Modern humans came from cave-people who came from monkey-people who came from monkeys. If you want to give a truthful answer, it's going to have to be something like that, with suitable pictures, perhaps the kind you'd find by googling "ascent of man" or "descent of man" or "homo habilis" or "neanderthal" or whatever.
posted by nowonmai at 7:48 PM on May 5

I have no idea what the answer is...adults or kids. At some point in evolution a baby was born...from what???

The grown-up answer is the evolution of sexual reproduction. The first organisms reproduced asexually. But asexual organisms change very slowly because change only comes from mutations. Sexual reproduction has many advantages. For example, mutations can come from either parent (and those mutations can't be too harmful because the parents had to survive to adulthood) and the offspring are a mixture of the parents.

Early on, sexual reproduction was similar to modern amphibians and (most) fish: the female released eggs into the environment, the male released sperm, the two sources of genetic material combined, and then the offspring developed completely separately from the parents. As in the case of amphibians and fish, this strategy leaves the eggs and offspring vulnerable, so it relies on large numbers to overcome losses to predators.

Later, organisms specialized by holding on to the eggs so that they could be protected within the mother's body during gestation. Eventually this evolved into the complex womb of placental mammals. This strategy puts more resources into fewer offspring, and many larger mammals have only one or two offspring at a time.

These developments took hundreds of millions of years and billions of mutations, some beneficial, many harmful, and many dead-ends.

The child version of that answer is that organisms change very, very slowly. Children always look almost exactly like their parents. You might point out that your child resembles his or her parents in particular ways (hair color, eye color, etc). The small differences can slowly add up, but it takes a long time. So there was always a mommy, until you get back to an organism that was its own mommy (i.e., asexual reproduction). From there, organisms were their own mommies all the way back to the very first organism.

By the way, that first organism probably evolved from simple molecules that had the ability to cause a reaction that made other molecules look like themselves. Those early molecules likely formed spontaneously in the chemical soup of the early earth.
posted by jedicus at 7:59 PM on May 5 [5 favorites]

you might like to take another angle:

every human life begins with a cell that divides, and keeps on dividing, no?

and as it does so, it takes on more & more structure (both within & outside the womb). a mommy is (in a way) just a container for the same kind of process that was happening zillions of years ago in the primordial slime - cells dividing & forming into multicellular creatures. only now, those creatures don't stop at a handful of cells, but keep going until they are immensely complex. complex enough for some of this dividing-and-growing to take place inside. birth is a semi-arbitrary point whereby the developing creature stops doing its stuff inside, and starts doing it outside.

so, the first mommy? probably the first cell that reproduced itself by splitting into two. it just got a bit more complex than that over time.
posted by UbuRoivas at 8:09 PM on May 5

We came from apes, not monkeys. If you get the taxonomy right now, it'll make things easier for your kid later.
posted by furtive at 8:26 PM on May 5

Thanks you all!

Lalalana, I googled "first person on earth kids question" and all sorts of other things but only got sex answers, and that's not what I was looking for. Duh, evolution. Sometimes I"m so blonde.

You all have great answers. I did say to her this morning, "Lucy, thats a great question and I really don't know the answer but I'll look into it and let you know." I was just so stunned by the depth of the question I was taken offguard. She's asking these sort of very thoughtful questions all the time now.
posted by aacheson at 8:29 PM on May 5

Really? You've got a story about how all that rubbish started? Say, I wonder who first invented a twee, digestible answer . . .

It's a little easier to work out how social interactions work than how life began - we can see that religious mythologies are similar to the stories that tribes tell their children around the campfire, and that they would nicely fit as answers to the questions every child asks at some point. It seems pretty reasonable to conclude that at least some of those creation stories got their start when the elders were put on the spot by younger members of the cultures.

But how life really began? We're only beginning to get good at enough at seeing into the past to put together a real story based on more than conjecture. I'd tell your kids it's one of the things they can be when they grow up - that an evolutionary biologist or biochemist etc is basically trying to work out exactly where that "first mommy" came from.

Be honest about what you do understand, and encourage them to follow through on an interest in it if they want - that it's an exciting area of research, that science has done a lot in the last century but is still figuring things out, etc. I wouldn't try to cram to explain stuff though. Just tell them what you think.
posted by mdn at 8:44 PM on May 5

> We came from apes, not monkeys. If you get the taxonomy right now, it'll make things easier for your kid later.

Apes (Hominoidea) are a subset of old-world monkeys (Catarrhini) so this point is a minor one that is probably not essential in a 5-year-old child's first introduction to the concept of evolution. Taxonomically speaking, apes ARE monkeys, despite how upset some of us feel about being described as such.
posted by nowonmai at 8:53 PM on May 5 [3 favorites]

Mommy doesn't know all the answers, but perhaps you can tell me if you find out.
posted by chrisinseoul at 9:42 PM on May 5

>It's ok to say "I don't know" or "No one really knows yet"

Absolutely. Inventing twee, digestible, answers is what started all the rubbish that people still believe today. Either skirt the issue at the limit of their understanding, or tell them we don't know exactly how it happened.

I agree with Blatcher and Brockles.

It's cool, if you don't do the whole God/creationism thing... but why try to put into kids term a theory that one our most intellectual predecessors spent the key stages of his life developing?

Just tell the kid that there's a giant pink panda that likes playing basketball and turning trees into mommies on Saturdays. Then laugh and change the subject... it sounds like your kid is going to be a big enough smart ass, as is. ;-)
posted by eli_d at 10:03 PM on May 5

It might help to consider that this question is roughly equivalent to the Chicken and egg problem, which has been stumping philosophers since antiquity (so no need to feel bad). Which came first, the mommy or the kid? Here's an essay discussing how to explain the chicken and egg problem to children, though probably not very helpful.
posted by PercussivePaul at 10:23 PM on May 5

Well, unless you want to tackle the concept of asexual reproduction, I would answer...an egg.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 10:27 PM on May 5

When Mommy was a little girl, and she had a question, she'd ask the people she knew. If they didn't know, she could go to the library when it was open, and there might be a book that had the answer. Sometimes the library didn't have the right book, and Mommy had to just wait and wonder, maybe ask more people later, or go to a different library and try again. But when Mommy was in middle school, some people wanted to share information faster, and they started making a way to do that. We now call it the Internet. On the Internet you can find almost any information that somebody knows, anywhere in the world, and it all comes to your computer -- here, let's try it. Ask a question.

It may look like I'm just trying to be a smartass, but I'm actually not. Showing a kid how to find information is more valuable than just giving her the answer. Show her your question here.
posted by Methylviolet at 10:28 PM on May 5 [3 favorites]

but why try to put into kids term a theory that one our most intellectual predecessors spent the key stages of his life developing?

Because just because something was hard to discover doesn't mean it's hard to understand? See: flat earth, zero, germs, gravity, etc.
posted by jacalata at 12:13 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

Here's the problem: "if everyone comes from mommy's belly,"

"We do not know a lot about this yet. We're still learning, but here's some of what we do know: A long, long, long, long time ago, we didn't look very much like we do now. We were very tiny, and it was easier to make more of us by making exact copies. We were simple and squishy enough that growing a bit larger and then dividing down the middle made two small critters."

Show her videos of cells dividing or yeast sporing. Give a sense of scale and what "tiny" means.

"Nature tends to try all sorts of crazy things by accident, and *almost all of them don't live*, but once upon a time, some goopy critters that usually self-divided, shared some genetic information with each other, and the next generation was different enough that it survived longer and better. So, this began a different way to reproduce, where one critter donates some genetic information about itself and the other makes, not an exact copy of herself, but a new baby with more variation than would normally have existed.

"This information sharing makes far more experiments, and so the critters that reproduced this way tried all sorts of different ways of living, and *many* died but some truly inventive variations lived -- and after a long, long, long time, you see what's around us today.

"Some critters still reproduce by making nearly-exact copies. Most of the things on the earth do. But these don't change a lot and are usually still a lot like the too-small-to-see, squishy critters of long ago. The ones that are really big like you, and oak trees, and hamsters, and ladybugs, are decedents of the critters that share genes to reproduce."

"So, that's where the first mommy came from. It was long, long ago, and she would normally have reproduced by growing and dividing into two, but something else happened, and that made all her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandkids pretty different than her."
posted by cmiller at 5:55 AM on May 6 [2 favorites]

There's some great suggestions above, but really...

It's o.k. and in fact necessary for people to admit that they don't know things, and that even when they have an 'answer' there is room for uncertainty, continued study, exploration, discussion, and retesting. Questions like this are a challenge and an opportunity:

"I don't know, sweetie. This is one of things that scientists study. Someday we'll go to the library and read about this. Who knows, maybe you'll want to be a scientist someday. Or maybe not. But even if you become a scientist, the 'answers' you get might not be the 'final answers' to your questions."
posted by Robert Angelo at 7:00 AM on May 6

Agree with admitting that you don't know. Explain that it was a REALLY long time ago, and you or anyone doesn't have the answer. It will make for a great learning experience- that there ARE problems and questions in the world that don't have answers. And that one of our jobs in life is to try and figure that stuff out. Maybe give the kid some "homework": have them imagine what they think it looked like and draw a picture or tell a story about it.

It would also make a good excuse to tell some family history. Show them some pictures of you and their grandparents when they were young, and explain that the generations go back so far that there weren't pictures, or even writing, to explain what happened. And show how family members sort of look alike but also sort of look different. Heck, go to a pet store and look at the kittens and puppies and see how they look similar and different to their parents.

(Because I think one of the problems with society is the tendency to try and give our kids (and ourselves) definite answers in an effort to simplify things. It's kinda like the Santa Claus thing- yes, it is delightful to see the wonder in a kid's face when they try to conceptualize the magic of Santa. But as time goes on, they realize it was a lie. They won't remember the good intentions- they'll just remember being manipulated. How many other things do we tell ourselves that end up being lies? When a kid gets older, they have two choices- have a distrust for anything people have ever told them and be angry, cynical jerks. Or, stick to the comfort of believing in magic and end up being republicans and trying to force other people to believe in their comfortable magic rather than confront the realities and mysteries of life.)
posted by gjc at 7:21 AM on May 6

It's cool, if you don't do the whole God/creationism thing... but why try to put into kids term a theory that one our most intellectual predecessors spent the key stages of his life developing?

Because we need to start early in encouraging people to investigate rational, critical-thinking skills. Our most intellectual predecessors spent their lives developing these theories so that we wouldn't have to. Thanks to them, we can explain complicated concepts like these to each other. Feeding kids ridiculous stories about pink pandas will not help them become the intellectual predecessors of future generations.

If you don't know all the details, it's definitely ok to say "I don't really understand all of it, but a lot of really smart people have spent a long time figuring out how it works." Then try your best to tell what you do know without making up facts in the process.

Here's my not-very-edited draft of something like how I might answer:

Well Suzy-Question-Asker, our world is really, really old. Older than anything you have probably ever thought of! See all this salt in the shaker? If you counted up all these grains of salt, the world has been here more years than that! A long, long, long time ago, there were all different animals in the world - like in your dinosaur books! (you do read kids' dinosaur books right? :) Those animals had babies just like we do, and every time they had a baby, the baby was just a little tiny bit different. See how all your friends are different than their mommies? Sometimes just their eye color or skin color was a little different, or maybe they were taller or shorter or stronger. Since that all went on for a long, long, long time, those small differences eventually became BIG differences, and sometimes the great-great-great-great grandchildren looked so different than the great-great-great-great-great grandmommies that we call them different animals! That went on over and over and over, and that's how we got all these amazing animals around us today. You and I are just like the other animals - can you think of any animals that look sort of like us? Our great-great-great-great-great grandmommies were actually monkeys (see caveats above about this)! And their great-great-great-great-great grandmommies were even more different, and wwwwwwwway before that were even different animals. No one really knows how the very first animal got to be here, but we have ideas. Maybe you will be the one that figures it out one day!

In my fantasy world, hopefully the child would ask at some point how we know all this, in which case I would be able to extol the virtues of skepticism and give them examples of all the evidence that we've found for evolution. Good luck!
posted by RobotNinja at 7:51 AM on May 6

I'm surprised that so many people here are trying to claim that nobody knows the answer, so I'll try again. The first modern human babies were born to somebody who probably looked like Homo erectus, who was in turn descended from something that would look like Australopithecus and backwards through apes, monkeys, squirrel-like things, possum-like things etc. etc. As a side note, the most famous Australopithecus is also called Lucy.

The slightly complicating factor is that there was no recognizable "first human, born to an ape", but rather very gradual changes that occurred within a subset of a population that was interbreeding. I would be daunted by the prospect of having to try to teach population genetics in college, let alone to a five-year-old, but it's important to realise it was a gradual change. Images like this might help.

On preview, something like what Robot Ninja just said.

Again, I'm not taking issue with the idea that it's fine to say "I don't know" but with all the people here who want you to say that nobody knows. We're spending all these tax dollars on anthropologists, paleontologists and evolutionary biologists and you don't care what they're doing? Richard Dawkins wrote a highly approachable book on the subject called "The Ancestors' Tale" that might be useful to those adults here who lack a basic familiarity with human evolution. For the kids, maybe this?
posted by nowonmai at 8:38 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

woah. Maybe it's time to talk about the things nobody really knows?
posted by debbie_ann at 8:52 AM on May 6

Again, I'm not taking issue with the idea that it's fine to say "I don't know" but with all the people here who want you to say that nobody knows.

The kid is asking where "the first mommy" came from, not how each mommy came to be different from the one before. We haven't figured out abiogenesis yet.
posted by mdn at 8:53 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

I'm surprised that so many people here are trying to claim that nobody knows the answer, so I'll try again.

I think that some of the people are saying what you think they're saying - that is, that they think no one knows the details of evolution, which is obviously not true. But others (myself included) are trying to indicate that there is no theory comparable to evolution which explains abiogenesis - that is, an explanation of where the "very first mommy" came from. There are ideas (lightning striking the primordial soup, panspermia, extraterrestrial origins, etc), but there is not a general scientific consensus on how life started in the first place. I think evolution is a good answer to the child's question anyway though, if only because it gets them thinking about these things.
posted by RobotNinja at 8:54 AM on May 6

Again, I'm not taking issue with the idea that it's fine to say "I don't know" but with all the people here who want you to say that nobody knows. We're spending all these tax dollars on anthropologists, paleontologists and evolutionary biologists and you don't care what they're doing?

Yes. Seriously, people do know. They don't "know" it in the way that they know, say, the atomic weight of carbon, but there is a lot of solid knowledge about it. We know, more or less, the same about the history of evolution as we know about the history of the solar system, and nobody would suggest that you tell your five-year-old that "nobody knows" how Earth's moon was formed.

Now, I'm not a parent, but I am an aunt and a godmother and as such, I am often the go-to person for Big Questions ("Was Jesus real or pretend?" "Why do we have to have money?" "Do trees think?") Of course you can't explain every scientific concept in terms a five-year-old will understand, but I think it's pretty important not to say "nobody knows" when that's not true. "It's very complicated, and scientists spend years in school so they'll be ready to study it" is true.
posted by Sidhedevil at 8:57 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

But others (myself included) are trying to indicate that there is no theory comparable to evolution which explains abiogenesis - that is, an explanation of where the "very first mommy" came from.

Do you have to go back as far as the origin of life to answer this question? It seems to me that the question is either "When was the first human being?", which is a question we do know the answer to, or it is "Does every living thing come from a mother?", which is a question we also know the answer to.

So you could either talk about speciation and evolution, or you could talk about sexual and asexual reproduction. At roughly the same age, I remember being fascinated by budding and fission and parthenogenesis and what-not. If you say "not everything comes from a mother--there are little tiny organisms called bacteria that just divide into two, and that's how they reproduce" it's likely to be interesting to the five-year-old, especially if you have cool pictures.
posted by Sidhedevil at 9:14 AM on May 6

> Lalalana, I googled "first person on earth kids question"...

aacheson will, I hope, correct me if I am wrong, but the question, as asked here, does not appear to be about abiogenesis, but about the first human mommy, and that's a question of human evolution.

But even if the question WAS "where did the first living things come from," aacheson's five-year-old daughter is not asking whether the first ribonucleotide chains were assembled on a sedimentary substrate or in free solution, or whether there was a sufficiently reducing atmosphere on early Earth to account for the presence of particular organic precursors.

I will side with Sidhevil and say that yes, we do know enough to be able to tell as much of the story as anybody without at least some high-school level training in both inorganic and organic chemistry can understand, all the way back to the big bang. The answer to the question is that a long time ago, a bunch of chemicals that were in the sea came together to form the first tiny little living things (show picture of amoeba or something, because even though the first cells wouldn't have looked like that, they make nicer pictures than bacteria). I will here say that I am sure aacheson's daughter is far more advanced in her studies of these subjects than I was at five, but I am not sure how easy it will be to get even this much across.
posted by nowonmai at 9:24 AM on May 6

Next time I side with Sidhedevil I will spell her name correctly. Sorry!
posted by nowonmai at 9:26 AM on May 6