MARK MY WORD: WHY DO KIDS SAY WHY?

Why?

My 2-year-old daughter, Becca, carries on a whole conversation with that one word.

"Mommy and Daddy have to go to work," I say.

"Why?" Becca asks, her face a mask of innocence.

"Because we have to," I reply.

These days, Becca sees everything as a why.

When Joni and I tell our daughter to put on her nightgown and get ready for bed, she readily asks the one-word question.

When she wakes up in the morning, she resumes with the "whys" with the constancy of an alarm clock.

She wants to know why we have to clean up the living room or go to the grocery store or do the dishes.

And like others her age, Becca doesn't ask just once. She asks over and over and over again.

The one-word question often gets a one-word answer. "Because," we reply.

"Because" ranks up there with "no" as an indispensable word for parents.

Without it, parents would spend their entire day doing little but answering questions from their wide-eyed children.

Even answering the question doesn't always help. I could spend 10 minutes answering one of Becca's "whys" only to have her look up at me and repeat the dreaded word.

If you have to repeat your answer a hundred times before breakfast, it helps to be brief. "Because" is a perfect answer in that regard.

Of course, parents also use the W-word. "Why don't you listen to me?" It is a question I often ask Becca these days.

Like children, adults also have whys that go unanswered. For many people, the baseball strike is one big why.

"I'm outraged," Joni said recently after learning that Gregg Jefferies of the St. Louis Cardinals makes $25,273 a day.

Assuming that he works a standard, eight-hour day, Jefferies is raking in more than $3,100 an hour or $52.65 a minute. If you add it all up, he is making $4.6 million for about seven months of work.

With that kind of a pay scale, a stop at the water cooler could pay for most people's summer vacations.

Becca doesn't understand anything about money yet. But she did wonder if outrage was a bad word.

"No," we told her. "It is OK to be outraged."

Personally, I wasn't thinking about outrage. It was the "why" that was on my mind.

Why can't I make the big bucks at the water cooler?

But with the baseball strike in full swing, Jefferies isn't making the big bucks. Gone is that $25,000-a-day pay check.

Still, it is hard to sympathize with ball players who can afford the price of admission to Disney World without even breaking a sweat.

If I were 2, I would be asking why again and again. But then, there are no easy answers to either my daughter's questions or the baseball strike.

Why?

Because.

Those two words are the essence of discussion between parents and 2-year-olds. They also go a long way in summing up the baseball strike.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer at the Southeast Missourian.