Ming explains why young children can't answer "How was your day?" They operate in a here-and-now language mode and can only describe what's in front of them. Caregivers should supply or prompt answers using what they know the child did.
Your child cannot answer certain questions like, how do you do at school? What do you eat for breakfast? What do you do just now? But these questions are in a different time, right? It's in the past or in the future, and you're trying to get them to answer you something that they've done. It's about their language ability, because even if they knew, they wouldn't be able to actually answer you because of the language level. So children who are at most one or two words, they are at a stage where we call here and now. And what we mean by here and now is that they are only capable of talking about here and now things like stuff that is right now right in front of you. They can only describe that because that's the level of which they can describe. If you ask them these questions outside of their language competency, of course they're not going to be able to answer you and they're going to repeat your questions. Therefore, at this point in time, what you need to do is just to tell them the answer. And it's very difficult to tell them the answer if you weren't there. Because if you ask, what do you do at school today without knowing that's not going to help them. To help them answer it, you must know what they did so that you can prompt them.
