Children And Science: Should Parents Encourage Their Kids To Engage in Scientific Thinking?

Parents have the absolute best intentions for their children's future, but in a world that provides a constant stream of advice, feedback and misinformation, ensuring that the best decisions for their children are being made is difficult.

One decision, though, that is undoubtedly good for the children's future is an investment and emphasis on science. Along with maths and English, science is a cornerstone subject that provides a great foundation to any child's development.

Children love to learn new things and not only do they love to learn, they are experts at it. Children learn by playing, observing, doing, testing ideas and pushing boundaries.

One of the ways that parents can help their child to develop is simply by allowing them to play and discover things for themselves. Even at a young age this curiosity is the starting point of scientific thinking.

Science helps children to think about things before they actually happen, and while we will all develop this skill to some extent, practicing this internal hypothesis process from an early age gives children a great advantage. Life is all about making more good decisions than bad decisions and having a solid framework of thought experiments offers a great advantage in life.

This is a practice that should be encouraged, nurtured and built upon. Science is not only a great subject because of the things that can eventually be done with it, but because of the life skills that it also teaches along the way.

So what are the life skills that science can teach? Check out the following infographic put together by psychology and science website psysci and read about just eight of them: