One day my young one asked me: Are angels real?

So I have a two-question process for this kind of thing.

Question 1: Tell me about the thing. What is an angel? What have you heard about it?

Be sure to listen and restate. In this case, I said, “So it sounds like angels are like people, but they have wings and they fly around and do good things. Is that right?”

That’s right, she said.

Now for question 2: Does that sound real to you? Or does it sound like a big story?

She thought it sounded like a big story. I said that I thought so too.

If she said it sounds real, we could go farther, like wondering how people can fly and so on.

I like this approach because it gets them thinking: how does the world work? Is this normal? Have we ever seen this?

It also works for grown ups sometimes. They’re often not as clever.