Critical Thinking: How You Can Help Your Child Develop This Essential Skill
When you’re gazing into your baby’s eyes after they are born, you’re probably not wondering “how am I going to develop your critical thinking skills?”.
When your toddler is having a meltdown in the dollar store, you’re probably not pondering how you could develop their critical thinking skills.
When you preschooler is about to jump off the couch and land on the cat, you’re definitely not dwelling on how to develop their critical thinking skills.
However, you should be thinking about your child’s development of their critical thinking skills because children need them in this fast-paced and ever-changing world we live in. They will need to be critical thinkers who can make sense of information, be able to analyze, compare, contrast and make inferences in order to become functioning adults. (https://www.brighthorizons.com/resources/Article/developing-critical-thinking-skills-in-children)
You might be wondering how to do it. Maybe even unsure if you know how to do it. It’s really not that difficult and you are probably already doing it without even knowing that you are! You are helping them build their critical thinking skills through day-to-day interactions, as you have conversations with your child, when you ask them open-ended questions and when you allow your child to solve problems and experiment.
Here are some tips and ideas that you can do to help your child build a foundation for critical thinking:
• Provide lots of opportunities for play. Certain play opportunities work on critical thinking skills – block play, board games, puzzles, sorting games…activities that get them using their brain to think and analyze problems. Pretend play, such as pretending to be a fireman and putting out that big house fire, work on critical thinking skills.
• Pause and wait. Allow your child time to think, perform a task or provide a response to your question. This allows your child time to figure out how to respond and provide the best answer.
• Children need to be challenged in order to develop and build on existing skills. When your child seems to be finding a task a bit more challenging than they are used to, wait a few minutes before jumping in to help. They may surprise you with their ability to solve a problem on their own.
• Simple science experiments will help children work on critical thinking skills. Ask questions such as “If we add cold ice to the warm water, what do you think will happen?”
• With babies, play simple disappearing and reappearing games such as peek-a- boo. Make a simple game of hiding objects for baby to find. This helps to develop your child’s memory and teaches them about object permanence.
• Encouraging your child to “think outside the box” during play will fine tune their creative problem solving skills. Ask questions such as “how else can we get the truck unstuck from the playdough?” or “What other way could we stack the blocks without them falling down?”
Once your child begins to develop and use critical thinking skills, they will become:
• more creative in their problem solving skills
• more independent
• more curious
• more resilient
• more engaged in activities
You can nurture your child’s critical thinking skill by encouraging curiosity and exploration, open-ended discussions, and providing opportunities to problem-solve. This will enable your child to develop critical thinking skills that will allow them to be successful in school and in life.