Critical thinking skills help your child succeed at school and throughout their life. Kids need to be able to analyze information, identify issues, and compare.

It’s good that children are naturally curious and open-minded, which is essential for critical thinking. But if you want to develop a strong foundation for critical thinking skills, here’s how you can do it.

Encourage Your Child to Form Opinions

If your child can say whether they agree or disagree with something means that they’re thinking critically. Always ask for the reasons behind their agreements or disagreements. This way, they use their critical thinking skills to form opinions.

Give Your Child Some Time

Give your child enough time to answer questions or to finish a task. It’s better that you don’t help them through the process but give them enough time to refine their answers or properly evaluate situations.

Don’t micromanage your child by demonstrating the right way to do things. Let them solve a problem on their own, as this will develop new neural pathways in their brain.

Help Children Work Through Their Reasoning

Work through any reasoning your child gives by asking questions that helps them cement their answer. Ask questions, give counter-examples, etc.

Ask Open-Ended Questions

Ask multiple open-ended questions on different topics to form thinking skills in your child. Don’t give answers because this might stifle their curiosity. Tied to the previous point, ask open-ended questions for any reasons they present. Apply a similar approach when they ask questions. Ask them for their opinions and what they think of a particular situation.

You must always encourage their answers even if they’re wrong. Help them work it through further by asking them how they came to that conclusion.

Try Not to Lecture Them

Kids have lower attention spans, and everything can pique their interest. However, if you start lecturing them on a topic, they might get bored and tune out completely. It’s no exaggeration that lecturing won’t do anything for their brain development.

Worst case scenario, you can turn them away from developing their critical thinking skills.

Encourage Play and Extracurricular Activities

Play and extracurricular are important to develop critical thinking skills in your child. Board games, building blocks, puzzles, and other games help develop critical thinking. You can also get your child into chess and debate clubs or a philosophy group.

Critical thinking skills are essential for child development from a very early age. That’s why you should select the best child development center for your child.

At Whole Child Development Center, we offer the best daycare center, after-school care program, and child development center in Lenexa. We’ll provide your child with an environment that’ll foster critical thinking skills and a love for learning.

Visit our website to know more.