Last night I read a Jewish prayer with my 6-year-old son. The prayer’s message was one of reward and punishment: If you obey God, and follow his commandments, you will be rewarded with food and land, and if you disobey him, you will be punished with famine and drought.

I tried to make things like grain, wine, and oil seem relevant to my son. “What happens if there is no rain? If there is no grass for the cows to eat, what are some things that will happen?” I asked him. He answered my questions and then very matter-of-factly said, “I don’t believe any of this is true.” There wasn’t a trace of either worry or irreverence in his voice.

I didn’t know what to say. Frankly, I agreed. But telling him this didn’t seem appropriate. It seemed like giving him too much information.

Insisting that the prayer be taken somewhat literally, however, also seemed like an inappropriate response. So I tried to validate his reaction as legitimate. “Some people feel that way,” I said.

I went on to tell him that just because he didn’t believe in the actual words of one prayer didn’t mean that he couldn’t embrace the values and lessons he learned from our religion. He was listening, I could tell, but still brushed me off with a series of “I know, I know, I know.”

“Why is the sky blue?” and “Where do babies come from?” really aren’t the difficult questions we parents have to answer. We might not know why the sky is blue, but we can certainly find out.

The difficult moments are when your kids ask questions that have thorny answers – answers that are unclear or mired in emotionally charged issues. Kids often ask the very questions that we are still struggling to answer today.

My friend recently fielded questions from her two teenage sons about her own experience smoking cigarettes and marijuana. “They wanted to know if I had ever smoked cigarettes, and at first, I said I hadn’t. But the truth is, I smoked for nine years. Very quickly I told them that I did smoke for a year and that it was one of the stupidest things I ever did,” she said, recalling that her son loved hearing her admit that she had done something stupid.

“It was trickier for me to answer my older son’s questions about if I had ever gotten high. I had a hard time lying, which I hear you are supposed to do, so I said that I did it a few times in college. That’s a lie right there. I was in high school. And I said that I didn’t like it because it made me feel bad and tired – another lie,” she said.

On the subject of drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes, are you supposed to lie? According to the Web site of the government-sponsored Federal Citizen Information Center, my friend’s instincts were correct: “Some parents who used drugs in the past choose to lie about it, but they risk losing their credibility if their children discover the truth. Many experts recommend that when a child asks this question, the response should be honest.”

The site goes on to give several examples of how to talk with your children when they ask you about your own drug history, and there is a history to tell. For example:

“I took drugs because some of my friends used them, and I thought I needed to in order to fit in. In those days, people didn’t know as much as they do now about all the bad things that can happen when you smoke marijuana or do other drugs. If I’d known then what I know now, I never would have tried them, and I’ll do everything I can to keep you away from drugs.”

Although it might be tempting to avoid the truth, being forced to discuss it provides the setting for an honest conversation about drugs, their attractions, dangers, and consequences.

Death is certainly another biggie that we parents find ourselves explaining to our children. My grandmother died when my son was nearly 4, and, of course, he had his fair share of questions. Highest on his mind was, “Where did she go?” Somehow, “In the ground being eaten by worms” didn’t seem to cut it.

Like my friend, lying didn’t feel right, and since I’m not a big believer in heaven, I didn’t know what to say. The director of my son’s nursery school said that young children need to have concrete answers when it comes to death, and that even while you may not believe in heaven, it is comforting for preschoolers to have a literal place to imagine their loved ones going. “This isn’t the same thing as lying to an older child,” she said.

A divorced friend whose children are old enough to remember life before the split said that some of her children’s hardest questions center around the divorce. She said that “no matter how prepared I was to answer my children’s inevitable questions, it wasn’t easy when they looked up and asked, ‘Why did you and daddy get divorced?’ or ‘Was dad cheating on you?’ “

Answering my children’s tricky questions became much easier when I granted myself permission to say, “That’s a good question. I don’t know.” I also learned to buy myself time by almost always first asking, “What do you think?” As my kids get older, I plan on adding, “That’s none of your business,” to the repertoire.

We try our best to muddle through these question-and-answer sessions. And like so many parenting moments, there really is no one correct way to answer these kinds of questions. For all of us, that’s a relief.