We also have to be compassionate to children's situations as human beings.
They're born and progress through the baby stage learning simply by observation and interaction with their surroundings (which includes parents, aunts and uncles, dogs and cats etc., and the geek in glasses pulling stupid faces at them) which all must be very confusing.
Once they're speaking, that additional means of communication allows them to ask questions. As parents, we should take full advantage of that progression to communicate to them explanations of the confusing and otherwise unexplained things that surround them.
"Look" said my kid from the back of the car one evening, "the moon is following us"! It was her simple observation without any real knowledge of what the moon was even, or why it appeared to be following us. We explained all this to her. Maybe she understood, maybe she didn't, but we didn't leave it as "because it is" or "shut the F**k up, I can't be bothered to explain".
We talk about teaching our kids and of course that's essential. But IMO most of their learning is centered on receiving an explanation of something that is not self explanatory or they can't explain themselves. Encouragement and explanations are paramount IMO.
We spent last week at the seaside and we're trying to "teach" her to swim. She's very comfortable in the water now but she still needs her arm-bands. She'll happily swim around all day in them. Then we went to a salt lake, which is a health spar type of place, with a natural lake close to the coast, which is naturally saline with approximately 7 times the density of salt compared with the Black Sea. (I think the lake is about 4 times the salt density of the North Sea). Anyway, it's a bit like the Dead Sea where you can float easily, we've all seen the photos of people lying on their backs reading a newspaper.
Ana was swimming about with her arm bands on and I said to her that this water was like magic water because it has a lot of salt in it. She said she'd noticed the difference because it tasted much saltier. I explained that meant it was easier to float in. Of course at 4 yrs + she wouldn't appreciate a physics lesson of differential specific gravities of various solutions and stuff, but she accepted what I said and I encouraged her to take her arm bands off. Scary stuff when you know that you can't swim!
She did anyway, and held on to me like a limpet. Step by step we parted and she was holding only my hands, then I said to her you let go of me. After a while she did, and she floated! She was ecstatic! The best thing was she had done it herself. I hear people say "just throw them in the deep end, they'll soon learn to swim" but IMO lessons are much better learned by the kid itself, more than being taught something or being forced into a situation and being made to deal with it.