Teach children critical thinking

When asking children to perform any task, give them a minute to think about what to do before giving your own opinion.

The review is to provide multi-dimensional analysis and assessment of any problems in life. Critical thinking does not occur when growing up but during the childhood. Refer to these nine methods of teaching children how to think this way.

Create opportunities to develop critical thinking

Finding out how many things work, things are ways of forming critical thinking. Like many other skills, children will easily acquire this skill through play. By creating a learning and playing environment, you will help your child see a problem in many ways. These practical experiences provide an indispensable foundation for the development of critical thinking in the future.

You can let your child play with puzzles, cook, and toys with a variety of resources to choose from. For example, when playing puzzles, children are forced to think, how to put the blocks into shapes or how many ways to make the puzzles they want. Through puzzles, children will have multi-dimensional analysis and practice their own thoughts, contributing to the formation of critical thinking.

Give children time to think

When asking children to perform any task or answer questions, do not force them to give an answer immediately. Instead, give your child time to think. Thinking time is important because children need it to consider a series of answers or how to do a task. They will have to choose the most appropriate answer after analyzing every aspect of the answers.

Do not do child care

When your child is doing any work, do not rush to help. Take 2 minutes or longer to observe how your child is working, then offer suggestions to help them do things if they are going in the wrong direction. Parents should refrain from completing work with their children because they will not have the opportunity to think but rely on the parents' method.

For young children, parents should patiently watch children work because they are not healthy enough and think deeply about the problem. For older children, ask critical questions and provide enough information so they don't get discouraged, but not so much as if you are taking care of the problem for your child.

Ask open questions

Parents need to provide enough information or ask critical questions, but how will they do it? For example, when your child asks a question, do not rush to answer but ask the opposite. Back-asking not only promotes critical thinking but also helps children to be more confident because they may already have answers but do not dare to express. You can ask your child: "Do you have any ideas?", "What do you think is going on?".

Also, respect your child's answers, whether accurate or not, by encouraging and continuing to ask open-ended questions: "Your way of thinking is interesting, let me know why you think like So? ".

Encourage your child to develop a hypothesis

While playing or chatting, parents can easily help children form different hypotheses in their heads. The development of hypotheses enables people to predict a problem in many ways, thereby forming solutions. So, when the problem actually occurs, we won't be confused. For example, ask your child: "If we do this, what do you think will happen?" or "Try to predict what happens next?".

Encourage your child to think in new ways

By encouraging your child to think differently, you will help them hone critical thinking skills and creativity. Ask questions like "What other ideas can we try?" or encourage your child to make choices by saying "Think about all the possible solutions".

Listen

Critical thinking immediately fails if the child is overwhelmed by emotion. For example, when your child is upset about performing a task, you will often help them to relieve anger, but this practice will erode their ability to think.

When your children release emotions like anger, happiness, sadness ... listen and care about their emotions. You listen not for the purpose of a solution but for sympathy and sharing. After calming down, children can think about and perform their tasks.

Accept the mistake

To learn how to succeed, children need to experience failure. Mistakes are opportunities for children to think differently, to analyze before making a decision. Sometimes, parents sometimes encourage children to make mistakes so that through these failures learn the value of critical thinking skills.

Self-responsibility

Stepping out of a safe area and taking responsibility for their actions and decisions is a way to help children form critical thinking. You can let your child make lunch or wash their own clothes. In the beginning, they may have problems such as poor cooking, no clothes to wear because they forgot to wash clothes. From there, children learn how to take responsibility, first of all with themselves and learn to think critically so as not to make mistakes as before.