How To Raise A Critical Thinker: 3 Ways To Nurture Critical Thinking In Your Kids

Lessons that focus on encouraging critical thinking in students are gaining more popularity these days. Instead of making students memorize facts, many educators are encouraging their students to inquire, investigate and look at lessons at a deeper level. Critical thinking should start at home and that is why parents need to learn how to raise a critical thinker.

Parents.com shared some of the most effective ways to nurture critical thinking in your kids. This can help develop a child's creativity, imagination, resourcefulness and potential for success.

1. Allow Your Kids To Strategize

One of the best ways to nurture critical thinking in your kids is by allowing them to strategize while trying to solve a problem. Parents should not solve all of their kids' problems for them. They should instead allow their kids to make plans and strategies on how to solve their own problems while giving guidance and suggestions when necessary.

Allow them to voice their thoughts and opinion while asking open-ended questions as well. This can help open up your kids' critical thinking skills.

2. Expose Your Kids To Open-Ended Stories

Stories that end ambiguously always fire up a child's curiosity and imagination. Expose your kids to books, comics, movies and TV shows with such endings and discuss with them what happened in the story and what could happen next.

Exposing kids to sophisticated artworks and allowing them to voice their interpretation of the artists' intentions can also develop their critical thinking. "Researchers from the Michigan State University have found a very strong correlation between childhood engagement in the creative arts and measurable success later in life," Raise Smart Kid shares.

3. Widen Your Kid's Horizons

One of the best ways to raise a critical thinker is to widen a child's way of thinking. "Schools that emphasize critical thinking want kids to consider different points of view," Parents.com explains. "Look for articles that contain both the 'pro' and the 'con' of a subject." Make sure that your children examine different sides of a story and not to easily believe and support anything they hear or read.