That's a perfectly valid response for the situation you're describing. But that's not the parent's situation, where the party being asked just silently asks AI (or googles) and feeds the result back without any added expertise.
"I don't know, here's what I would do to find out" is teaching someone; returning an AI response is not.
If I can tell you tried to figure it out via vocabulary and things you tried, I’ll do everything I can get help get you across the finish line.