Unlocking Critical Thinking to Empower Your Child’s Future By School is Easy
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arents want the best for their children, and one of the things you can do to secure a bright future for your kids is to make critical thinkers out of them. A critical thinker is open-minded, curious, and can respect diverse perspectives. However, raising critical thinkers does not happen naturally, it will require some effort. You’ll need to be intentional in your approach and even challenge your child to cultivate critical thinking capabilities. But the effort will help your child gain confidence and set them on a successful path no matter where life takes them. We’ve gathered together some tips and advice to help you nurture critical thinking in your children. The Foundation of Critical Thinking
Before we explore strategies for teaching critical thinking to your children, let’s establish what critical thinking means. In simple terms, critical thinking involves sorting through information to make informed decisions or form opinions. However, life is rarely as simple as this definition suggests—we are constantly inundated with a vast amount of information on a daily basis. In fact, statistics show that 328.77 million terabytes of data are produced each day. When raising critical thinkers, you must review information with them to help make sense of all the voices speaking to them. Your guidance is vital to demonstrate to your kids
how to sort through reliable and trustworthy information and discard data that is not relevant to them or may even be untrue. Remember—knowing how to think critically differs from other types of skills, like memorization or repetition. Critical thinking requires more activity from kids’ brains. It involves problem-solving or figuring out how things work. In other words, critical thinking requires more effort than rote learning.
Essentially, open-mindedness is the willingness to consider information that contradicts a person’s belief.
As you are raising critical thinkers, review some ways you can encourage them to keep going. Parent support is crucial in the development journey for kids, and for helping them think for themselves. Now that we’ve defined what critical thinking is, here are some tips for raising critical thinkers: Tip 1: Encourage Curiosity
Children are naturally curious about the world, how it works, and why things are the
way they are. Encouraging this curiosity in kids is one way you can help them develop critical thinking skills. Invite them to ask questions about the world or topics they are interested in, and then let them find the right answer. Critical thinking can guide curious kids to find the truth by making a guess answer to the question and then testing it to see if they were correct. Tip 2: Promote Open-mindedness
Essentially, open-mindedness is the willingness to consider information that contradicts a person’s belief. Therefore, promoting openmindedness for children encourages them to think about ideas that are different from their own. It does not imply acceptance of every and all ideas, but rather tolerance for views that conflict with the ones we hold. Some ways that parents can do this is to expose children to different cultures and ideas and then discuss them. Look at some of the positives and some of the negatives of the idea. It’s also important to model openmindedness to your children through your own actions and behaviors. Tip 3: Exposure to Diverse Perspectives
Building empathy and understanding by exposing your children to diverse perspectives can also foster critical thinking. This may include traveling to different countries or even engaging in diverse cultural activities bcparent.ca • education issue 2023 9
