I Stopped Asking My Kids “How Was Your Day?” More Than 20 Years Ago

Brooke Silva
Aug 24
6 min read

Family dinner table with conversation cards and journal for meaningful family conversations

“How was your day at school?”

“Good.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

Cool. Great talk, everyone.

More than 20 years ago, I stopped asking my kids questions that could be answered with one word.

Not because I had some grand parenting philosophy. I simply wanted them to talk to me.

So I started asking different questions.

Who helped you today?
Who would you write a thank-you card to?
What's something you learned that you didn't know before?
What color did you see over and over?
Did you see any animals?
What's something that made you laugh?

Those questions gave me something “How was your day?” rarely did.

Tidbits.

Little pieces of their lives.

Sometimes I got a story. Sometimes I got a weird observation. Sometimes a question absolutely lit one of them up.

And sometimes a question did nothing for them.

That was useful too!!!

I started learning which questions opened doors for each of my kids instead of expecting every question to produce some deep, meaningful conversation.

Because that was never the point.

Then something happened as they got older

I didn't have to drag the tidbits out of them anymore.

Tommy and Matt are adults now.

And they still bring me the little things.

When they travel, they notice things. A cool seashell. A funny sticker stuck somewhere. Something weird they saw that made them laugh.

More importantly, they share those things with me.

That's the part I didn't fully appreciate when they were little.

I wasn't only getting my kids to talk at the dinner table.

We were creating a habit of sharing the small parts of our lives with each other.

The questions didn't have a name back then

“InBetweenies” actually came years later.

More than ten years ago, I was teaching Realtors about technology.

At the time, I was coming out of a role that had left me burned out, and I started noticing the same exhaustion in a lot of the high performers I was teaching.

I didn't want to teach people technology simply so they could cram even more work into their lives.

I wanted them to use technology as a tool. Make the work easier. Create some breathing room. And pay attention to something we tend to forget when we're chasing the next big goal:

Celebrate the little things.

The things that happen between the big wins. The InBetweenies.

That idea stuck.

Eventually, I realized I'd been practicing a version of it around my own dinner table for years.

Gratitude isn't pretending everything is wonderful

This is important to me.

I don't believe gratitude means deciding a terrible day was secretly great. Some days suck. Some seasons are hard. Sometimes the answer really is, “Today was awful.” Noticing something funny doesn't erase that.

Being grateful that someone helped you doesn't mean the rest of the day magically becomes good. Both things can be true.

That's one of the reasons InBetweenies focuses so much on noticing.

Something made you laugh.
Someone helped you.
You learned something you didn't know yesterday.
You noticed something interesting.
You accomplished something.
You saw, smelled, heard, or experienced something you want to remember.

None of those things requires you to grade your entire day as GOOD.

I made InBetweenies for Families

I've already made an InBetweenies journal.

I've made a version for classrooms.

But this one feels especially personal because, in a way, this is where the whole thing started.

Around a table.

Asking better questions.

InBetweenies for Families uses nine familiar questions that you can use again and again.

You don't need 365 new gratitude prompts.

There are approximately eleven billion gratitude prompt lists on the internet.

Okay, I made that number up but it feels accurate.

The questions can stay familiar because your answers don't.

Your Tuesday isn't the same as your Thursday.

Your 10-year-old's answer isn't the same as yours.

And the answer they give at 10 probably won't be the answer they'd give at 16.

That's the interesting part.

Adults, you have to answer too

This may be my biggest rule.

We spend a lot of time asking our kids to tell us about their lives.

What did you learn?
What happened?
What made you happy?
Who did you talk to?

Yet then we sit there like we're conducting an interview.

Participate!

Let your kids hear what you thought was worth remembering.
Let them hear what made you laugh.
Tell them what you learned.
Tell them who helped you.
Let the other people in your family know what you're grateful for, what caught your attention, and what happened in your little corner of the world.

They deserve to know you too.

Everyone answers the same InBetweenies, but everyone experienced the day differently.

That's where some of the best conversations happen.

Please don't turn this into another chore

Seriously.

If InBetweenies starts feeling heavy, stop.

You don't need a streak. Nobody needs to make up Wednesday's page because you forgot. There is no InBetweenies police.

Use them at dinner. Before bed. On Sunday. On vacation. On a road trip. Whenever everybody happens to be hanging around.

Pull three questions.

Or two.

Or one.

If one question sends everybody into a 20-minute conversation, congratulations. You did it.

The goal isn't completing the page.

The goal is noticing and sharing.

Use the paper

I know. I'm the technology person telling you not to digitize something.

Hear me out.

Make this tactile.
Write.
Draw.
Doodle.

If you have littles, help them write or let them draw their answer.

Because there's something about keeping the actual marks people made that technology can't quite reproduce.

I love seeing how kids' handwriting changes.
I love watching answers change.
One-word responses become sentences. Sentences become stories.
That backwards letter disappears.
The doodles change.
Their handwriting becomes their handwriting.
If one person types everybody's answers into a phone, we've also accidentally made that person the family secretary instead of a participant.
Give everybody a page.
Let everybody make their own marks.

Keep it where you can see it

Digital things have a wonderful way of disappearing into the abyss.

You download something.

You think, “We're totally doing this!”

And six months later it's living happily in a Downloads folder with 4,782 other files.

Print the question cards. Put them somewhere your family can see them.

A jar. A bowl. A bag. Whatever works in your house.

Make the binder fun.

Let people decorate their sections. Use stickers. Draw on it. Pick a ridiculous binder if that's what your family wants.

Make InBetweenies part of a routine if that helps you remember it.

But don't confuse routine with obligation.

Someday, the pages become something else

It's hard to remember everything.

And littles grow up very fast. Even though some days it feels very, very slow.

I want these pages to become the kind of keepsake that jogs your memory years from now the way a photograph does.

You don't need it to document every detail.

Maybe you open the binder years later and see an answer in your kid's handwriting and suddenly remember the whole story that went with it.
Maybe you remember what they were obsessed with that year.
Who their friends were.
What made them laugh.
What they were learning.
What mattered to them.
And maybe they'll get to see those things about you too.

Bring your family along for the adventure

I truly believe in this.

If my family doesn't understand what I'm grateful for, and I don't understand what they're grateful for, there are a lot of missed moments between us.

Accountability is easier together.

Noticing is more fun together.

And you never really know what a few minutes of listening to someone talk about what they noticed might do for their confidence.

It tells them:

I want to hear this.
The things you notice are worth sharing.
Your little stories matter here.
Our kids are only in our homes for so long.

They're our family forever.

Tommy and Matt grew up.

And they still bring me the tidbits.

That's exactly what I hoped for. And Hope gets to do this now too.

Ready to try InBetweenies with your family?

InBetweenies for Families is a $7.99 printable family activity built around the same idea that started at my own dinner table more than 20 years ago.

You get nine reusable InBetweenie questions, cut-apart question cards, individual journal pages, and a simple family binder system.

Pick a few questions. Everyone answers from their own perspective.

Write. Draw. Doodle. Talk. Skip one.

There are no streaks to keep and nothing to catch up on.

GET INBETWEENIES FOR FAMILIES | $7.99

Use code STAYCURIOUS9 for $2 off.