[A student] told me she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time. I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.1
—William Deresiewicz, social critic and author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
Often we catch ourselves daydreaming about what our kids will be like when they grow up, what they’ll do to earn a living, and how they’ll construct a meaningful life. Our hearts swell in anticipated pride when we imagine them competent and successful at work, productive and engaged as citizens, valued in their community, and perhaps playing the roles of partners and spouses and fathers and mothers themselves one day.
In that dreamed-of future state, our kids will need to know how to think—that is, to be able to really think things through and figure things out for themselves. They’ll need to be able to hold a thing in their hands and examine it, or to hold a concept in their brains and reason with it and, after examining or reasoning with it, to decide how to approach solving it if it’s a problem, or if it’s a concept, whether and to what extent and why they agree or disagree. We don’t want our kids to be robots—mechanistically giving answers or going through motions dictated by someone else. We want them to be thinkers. But too many schools today promote rote memorization and regurgitation, and in our homes we’re doing too much overdirecting, overprotecting, and hand-holding. We end up doing way too much of our kids’ thinking for them. They need to think for themselves. René Descartes said, I think, therefore I am. If we’re not letting our kids think for themselves, are we not letting them be?
And, it turns out, thinking is not only an existential necessity (as if that weren’t enough!) but, increasingly, an economic one.
THINKING MATTERS
In his 2009 best-selling book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink describes how being able to figure things out is especially essential for an employee in the twenty-first-century workplace. He shows that jobs requiring “algorithmic” tasks (ones in which you’re given a set of instructions that you follow down a single pathway to one conclusion) have been outsourced or given over to computers, whereas 70 percent of job growth in the United States today is for jobs entailing “heuristic” tasks—where you must think through the task, experiment with possibilities, and come up with a novel solution precisely because no algorithm exists.2 Workers in the twenty-first century will need to be able to think for themselves.
The Foundation for Critical Thinking, an educational nonprofit focused for over thirty years on inculcating critical thinking in students, agrees, warning, “In a world of accelerating change, intensifying complexity, and increasing interdependence, critical thinking is now a requirement for economic and social survival.”3
In 2000, a German researcher named Andreas Schleicher developed the Program for International Student Assessment test (PISA) to help nations determine whether their teenagers had the thinking skills necessary to succeed in the twenty-first century at college, in the workplace, and in life.4 PISA didn’t ask kids to answer equations or give definitions (things kids can memorize and cram into short-term memory) and didn’t use a multiple-choice format (which narrows an infinite set of possibilities down to four or five choices from which the correct answer can often be deduced or “figured out”). Instead, it asked them to take whatever knowledge they had in their brains and apply it to real-world situations and scenarios that require critical thinking and effective communication (such as whether a graph explains what it purports to explain, or whether a public health poster is effective at convincing the reader to get a flu shot). Put simply, PISA’s purpose is to reveal which countries teach kids to think for themselves, says investigative journalist Amanda Ripley in her best-selling 2013 book The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way.
The first PISA test was given in 2000 to teenagers in dozens of countries, including the United States. It has been given every three years since. As Ripley shows, high scores on the PISA had nothing to do with school funding, race, or class. High scores came in countries where educators and parents promote rigor in learning (having very high standards, and engaging in the effort toward learning those standards) and mastery (a deep level of understanding demonstrated by being able to apply concepts learned).
In the United States, year after year, teenagers’ results on the PISA test were only average, which stings for a nation that prides itself as the world leader across many realms including education, economic productivity, leadership, and innovation. PISA scores for the United States reveal that American kids aren’t being exposed to rigor and aren’t being held accountable for mastery, and therefore they are not learning to think for themselves. These results predict that U.S. kids will not possess the skills of complex decision making or effective communication they’ll need in order to thrive and lead in the real world.
In 2006 the American Institutes for Research, a behavioral and social science research organization, reported outcomes supporting those dire predictions. “More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks” such as “analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents, and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.”5
Critical thinking isn’t just about being able to understand the news and balance your checkbook (which is itself an outmoded concept). It’s much broader and richer than that. In Excellent Sheep, Bill Deresiewicz describes the “sheep-like” state of many young people who, in his view, jump through the various hoops parents, educators, and society place ever higher in front of them, and end up with high grades and scores and accolades for things they’ve done. While the doors to elite colleges, and to a narrow set of elite professions, are open to these kids, Deresiewicz argues that their minds are closed. They haven’t been taught to wrestle in the intellectual gray areas, to contend with the right and wrong of the matters they’ve memorized. They’re doing what they think they’re supposed to, without pausing to ask if it’s what they actually want for themselves, and why. Both the “teach to the test” schooling and a home life with authoritarian or indulgent/permissive parents, situated in a larger societal and cultural milieu that values achievement and accomplishment over thinking and learning, are to blame.
UNDERMINING THINKING AT SCHOOL
In her 2001 book “Doing School”: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students,6 Denise Pope—Stanford educator and cofounder of the nonprofit organization Challenge Success—wrote about the so-called teach-to-the-test mentality endemic in U.S. K–12 schools, and how kids educated this way behave like robots: info comes into their brains in the form of instruction, and they spit the info right back out onto homework, school exams, or standardized tests. The federal policy No Child Left Behind, promulgated in 2002, has only furthered the “teach to the test” mentality of which Pope initially wrote in 2001, instead of promoting the rigor and mastery necessary to develop thinkers. In her nationally acclaimed 2010 film Race to Nowhere, filmmaker Vicki Abeles put a human face on the kids Pope studied.
Pope’s research shows that kids “do school” but don’t end up learning, that they experience tremendous stress (not good stress, but psychologically damaging stress) from this approach, and that they adopt a “whatever it takes” mind-set in order to get the right score or grade or to simply get all of the homework done, which, Pope found, includes cheating at epidemic rates. Homework is valuable if it engages students more deeply with the material, but not when it’s just busywork.7 But “there is a lot of confusion between rigor and load on the part of teachers, administrators and parents,”8 Pope has said more recently. Author and social critic Alfie Kohn took a critical look at a wide swath of research on homework and concluded there was no proven benefit to it at all.9 Yet, as we all know, the homework just keeps coming.
The Foundation for Critical Thinking refers to the “teach to the test” type of teaching as the “mother robin” approach, because it’s akin to mentally chewing up everything for kids and putting it into their intellectual beaks to swallow. The foundation reports that kids taught this way can repeat things back but they don’t actually learn, and they will lack the ability to apply that information in different scenarios, and in that sense will not really know it. According to the foundation, kids then adopt a mind-set that they can’t understand anything unless told exactly how and what to say, think, or do. They need things figured out for them. They don’t want to be challenged to do anything more than repeat back from the parent, teacher, or textbook.10
UNDERMINING THINKING AT HOME
In our homes, many of us are caught up in the “mother robin” approach to homework, testing, activities, choices, and tasks—instead of letting our kids figure things out for themselves. Recapping Part 1 of the book, here’s how we do this:
1. We overprotect: We are their bumpers and guardrails. We assess risk for them, tell them when it’s safe to cross the street, whether Halloween candy can be eaten, and not to climb trees or use tools. We are risk averse, prefer for them to be within our sight at all times—at stores, outdoors, going to and from school—and tell them never to talk to strangers. We praise them at every turn—taking their side over the judge or teacher who found them subpar, and calling every effort “perfect.”
2. We overdirect: We tell them what to play, what to study, what activities to pursue and at what level, which colleges are worth looking at, what to major in, which career/profession to pursue. We solve problems for them and shape the way they dream.
3. We hand-hold: We go to bat for them with teachers and coaches. We act as concierge for the logistics of their life. We second-guess the decisions of authority figures. We correct their math homework, fix their essays, and overly edit or outright write their applications.
Essentially, when we overparent, it’s as if we get inside our kid’s head and live there—like our personal rendition of Being John Malkovich. We supplant our thinking for theirs with our constant, vigilant, determined presence in their lives, and via cell phone. We do all of this because we think this is what love looks like, and to ensure they “make it,” that is, succeed professionally, grasp the brass ring of life. But when we parent this way, childhood hasn’t been a training ground for our kids to learn to think for themselves; they merely “do” the various things on the checklisted childhood. We haven’t prepared our kids for success in college, work, or life if we haven’t taught them—made them, allowed them—to think.
WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT
At the school level, when it comes to teaching kids to figure things out for themselves, things seem to be in a bit of a mess, to put it mildly. The Common Core State Standards Initiative arose in 2009 partly in response to PISA’s warning that in the main, U.S. kids lack critical thinking skills, and thus are unprepared to succeed in college, work, and life. Yet the Foundation for Critical Thinking, based at Sonoma State University in California, has for over three decades worked at teaching educators to teach critical thinking to kids, and their research reveals that even most educators don’t know what critical thinking is, let alone how to teach it. Improving how critical thinking is taught in schools is a complex problem—and is not the focus of this book.
But in our own homes we parents can and should take up the task of teaching our kids to think—to figure things out for themselves—instead of having them go through the motions of processing information and life experiences mechanistically, by improving our conversations with our kids about what they’re learning, experiencing, and deciding.
Here’s how. At its most basic, the term “critical thinking” means “thinking” itself, and can be understood simply as “figuring things out” and “applying knowledge to new situations.” The concept of critical thinking dates back to Socrates, who developed a back-and-forth style of questioning with his students—most notably Plato—which opened students to the rationale for their ideas and led to deeper understanding of the soundness or fallacy of their reasoning, which then allowed them to apply their understanding in different circumstances.
As a law student at Harvard in the 1990s I was treated to “the Socratic method” style of teaching and learning. The vast majority of law professors use this approach, as do professors in many other disciplines. It’s a tried-and-true method for bringing a person to a real level of understanding of a matter and stands in contrast to rote memorization, or being told how to solve something, what the “right” answer is, or what to believe.
Children who have figured out a problem, concept, or idea for themselves can talk about the why and how of the matter rather than the mere fact of its existence, and can apply what they’ve learned to new situations. Some contend that the Socratic method is inappropriate for children, because it teaches them to question authority. To others, such as the Foundation for Critical Thinking, the Waldorf Schools, and some Montessori educators, a simplified version of the Socratic method—helping someone understand information or make a decision by continuing to ask them questions about it—is a trusted method for helping children figure something out for themselves instead of the teacher (or parent) supplying the information or the answer. Educator Jennifer Fox, author of Your Child’s Strengths: A Guide for Parents and Teachers, would agree. In her book she explains that you can help kids get to the heart of understanding a matter by asking them the question “Why?” five times.11 I call it the continual questioning approach.
TIPS FOR TEACHING YOUR KIDS TO THINK FOR THEMSELVES
If we want our kids to be able to think for themselves, we have to be willing to open up a dialogue with them and resist the natural temptation to give the answer, say what we know about a situation, solve the problem, and in other ways shut the dialogue—and their thinking—down. When our kids are infants and toddlers it’s highly appropriate for us to engage in a running monologue about their environment—that’s how they learn the language—but once they are toddlers and can carry on a bit of conversation, we want them to be doing their share of the talking in response to our good, open-ended questions.
Since conversation is the best mechanism for practicing and seeing the results of critical thinking, below are sample dialogues between parent and child that demonstrate ways you can teach your kids to think for themselves. These dialogues employ the continual questioning approach, which boils down to you, the parent, being always interested in the “what,” “how,” or “why” underneath whatever your kid has just said. This method will work regardless of your kid’s age, though the subject matter will change and grow more complex as the child matures and becomes more intellectually sophisticated. Note that when a child is very young, your questions might be more “leading” (in that you know the answers to the questions you’re posing and are guiding them in that direction), but as a child ages, you may know less about the subject at hand; nevertheless a good set of continual questions on your part will bring them (and you) to a deeper understanding of the situation. Following are variants of how this continual questioning approach can teach kids of all ages to think for themselves. (Don’t stress out about this—we’re all busy and don’t necessarily have the time or mental space to sit around philosophizing like Socrates—you don’t have to have these kinds of dialogues all the time; just try to incorporate some continual questioning whenever you see the opportunity and are able to make the time.)
1. TALKING WITH PRESCHOOLERS
First is an example of a conversation that applauds a child for what he knows but doesn’t teach him to think.
CHILD: A butterfly!
PARENT: Yes, that’s a butterfly. Good job! What color is it?
CHILD: Orange and black.
PARENT: That’s right! You’re so smart.
Using the same scenario, here’s how you might open up the conversation using the continual questioning approach:
CHILD: A butterfly!
PARENT: Ooh, what’s the butterfly doing?
CHILD: It’s on that flower. And now it’s on another flower!
PARENT: Why do you suppose it likes the flowers?
CHILD: Because they’re pretty?
PARENT: Maybe. Can you think of another reason?
… etc.
A conversation with a little kid can go on for a surprisingly long period of time. Continual questioning helps the child unpack what they already know and helps them figure out the next set of concepts related to what they already know. They’re learning. And your attention itself is an even greater prize.
2. TALKING WITH ELEMENTARY SCHOOLERS
In elementary school, conversations between parents and kids often surround a logistical problem—my bike tire is flat; I left my homework at school—that our kid might expect us to handle for them. Here are sample dialogues about a situation to be managed and how we can help our kids come to their own solution. First, a poor dialogue:
PARENT: How was school?
CHILD: Fine. But I forgot my backpack.
PARENT: Oh no! I’ll drive you back to school so you can get it.
This parent hasn’t taught the kid how to think about the problem and instead zoomed ahead to solving the problem for the kid. Not only does the kid not know how to pick apart the situation and devise a solution, the kid is more likely to forget the backpack again in the future because she hasn’t suffered the consequences of having forgotten it. (A similar scenario would be a kid who can’t wake up on time and whose parent continues to wake him up and/or makes alternate arrangements to get him to school if he’s missed his usual mode of transport.) The better dialogue:
PARENT: How was school?
CHILD: Fine. But I forgot my backpack!
PARENT: Oh no.
CHILD: What am I going to do?
PARENT: I’m not sure. What do you think you can do about it?
CHILD: I don’t know! Will you drive me back to school to get it?
PARENT: I’m sorry, but I can’t—I’ve got other things to do this afternoon. What do you think you can do about it?
CHILD: I could call my friend and ask what the homework is.
PARENT: Okay.
CHILD: But I might not have what I need if it’s in the backpack.
PARENT: Hmm. Yeah.
CHILD: Or I could e-mail my teacher and tell her I forgot it and see what she says.
PARENT: Those both sound like good ideas.
… etc. Let the child go through the work of trying out the solutions.
The kid learned that the parent doesn’t feel responsible for the problem and that he is going to have to figure it out for himself. This “tough love” approach may be particularly hard for permissive/indulgent parents, but keep in mind that the most loving thing to do here is not to do it for them but to teach them how to do for themselves. Elementary school homework is rarely of consequence in contrast to middle or high school (the same goes for being on time for school). It’s better for her to learn the lesson of how to remember that backpack (or to wake herself up) now, than for her to still be facing those issues when she’s in a higher-stakes school environment and where you’ll feel tempted to help her avoid those harsher consequences.
3. TALKING WITH MIDDLE SCHOOLERS
Middle schoolers are still our little kids, but they’re rapidly changing into teenagers. We call them “tweens” in recognition of this in-between phase. They want us to be involved and interested in their lives but can be quick to close down if we seem overly focused on what to them feels like the wrong thing. First, a poor dialogue:
PARENT: How was school today?
CHILD: Fine.
PARENT: How’d you do on the Spanish test?
CHILD: I got an A!
PARENT: Great!
The parent focused on grades, not on what the child was learning or found interesting in the class. A better dialogue might go something like this:
PARENT: How was school today?
CHILD: Fine.
PARENT: What did you enjoy most?
CHILD: Spanish.
PARENT: Great! How come?
CHILD: It’s my favorite class!
PARENT: How come?
CHILD: I always get a really good score on tests and homework is never hard and I’m never lost. I raise my hand all the time and when she does call on me, especially when other people aren’t getting it, I feel “Yay! I’ve got this, let’s go!”
PARENT: How can you tell you’re good at it?
CHILD: Well, when my teacher is explaining something, I can guess what she’s about to say because I already know exactly how it works. I know what’s coming next. I can explain it to my friend.
… etc. Keep asking why and how.
It’s one thing for a child to know she likes a subject, but as this dialogue demonstrates, what we really want is for a child to be able to hone in on how she knows what she knows.
4. TALKING WITH HIGH SCHOOLERS
A high schooler’s interior world is full of feelings and fueled by hormones; they can be a mystery to themselves, and also to us. Typically when we ask high schoolers about their day, we get a short answer like “fine.” As their parents we are craving more information, and we also want to help them get to the why and how of what they learn and experience so they can develop a deeper understanding of themselves, other people, and the world, and can make better choices and decisions. We can get past a teen’s typical one-word response by repeatedly (but thoughtfully and creatively) asking “why” or “how” in response to their statements—just as with the preschooler and the butterfly—until they reveal the nugget of their experience or learning. When we engage in these critical thinking dialogues, we behave as active listeners, an added benefit of which is that we demonstrate to them that we’re actually interested in them beyond the transactional issues of life such as whether they got their homework done, what grade they got, or whether their team won or lost. These conversations become quality time. First, a poor dialogue:
PARENT: How was school today?
CHILD: Fine.
PARENT: What kind of homework do you have?
CHILD: I have a ton of math, some chemistry, and an English essay draft due (heavy sigh).
PARENT: But I thought you were enjoying reading Cyrano de Bergerac.
CHILD: Yeah. I like reading it, but that doesn’t mean I want to write an essay about it.
PARENT: Come on, you can do it. Just think of what you like about Cyrano and …
CHILD: Mom. It’s not that simple.
PARENT: I know. But you’re so smart. I just want you to have confidence that you can do it.
CHILD: I just want to get it done.
The parent supplanted his thoughts (you like Cyrano) for the child’s own (I’m dreading this essay). The parent then tried to build the child’s confidence with his own words rather than have the child come to feel that his own effort could make a difference. Here’s a better dialogue:
PARENT: How was school today?
CHILD: Fine.
PARENT: What did you enjoy most?
CHILD: Well, we’re reading Cyrano de Bergerac in English.
PARENT: Mmm. And why was that fun?
CHILD: Well, we were reading out loud and I got to be Cyrano.
PARENT: How’d it go?
CHILD: It was really cool.
PARENT: Why?
CHILD: Because I like Cyrano.
PARENT: Why do you think you like Cyrano?
CHILD: I don’t know. Maybe because all of the things Cyrano does to aid Christian and Roxanne’s romance. Even though maybe he shouldn’t.
PARENT: What do you mean? Why does he do that?
… etc.
The child moved from a cursory sense that he likes Cyrano to a more nuanced understanding of why, which will aid him in classroom discussion and in writing that essay he has to write.
DON’T LET THEM JUST “DO SCHOOL”
As Denise Pope outlined in “Doing School,” kids today have tremendous pressure to simply get the work done—to “do school”—rather than to learn. They learn to do tasks, to produce every element the teacher wants to see in a five-paragraph essay, or to memorize every term in bio and every formula in math. They think their next task is to get into certain schools in order to be a success in life, and this mind-set often then extends to career and professional pursuits.
I called up Jeff Brenzel, dean of admission at Yale, to ask him what he was seeing by way of “doing school” versus freethinking in his undergraduates.12 “I see a continuing tendency in some to play it safe, to view what they’re doing here as a kind of career-building step. It leads them to a perfectionism and a reluctance to experiment, fail, or rebel, and actually serves them poorly in the long haul. I suspect that twenty years down the road they’ll be having midlife crises, feeling they were in a straitjacket. Failure to recognize that an education has to be seized rather than delivered to you is the harm that’s really done.”
I saw and heard about this mentality at Stanford, too, where students had difficulty contending with the open-ended and the uncertain and just wanted to continue in the manner to which they had grown accustomed, which was to be very good at delivering on what they were told to do. A faculty member in Stanford’s equivalent of freshman English told me of what is now a common scenario in her field—handing a paper back to student scrawled with feedback—say more; how do you know?; what’s the motivation here?; and then what—to which undergraduates plaintively plead, “I don’t know what you want. Just tell me what you want me to SAY.”
On the other side of campus—engineering—John Barton, director of the architectural design program within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford, sees a similar dynamic playing out.13 Barton teaches an introductory drawing course (an architect needs engineering skills but also needs to know how to draw) and many students approach him wide-eyed, worried that they don’t have the skills even to begin. “They say they had never had a drawing course in their life. I see this regularly now.”
Students tell Barton things like, “Well, I knew that I wanted to get into a really good university and I took as many AP courses as I could. And yes, my school had an art requirement, but not at an AP level and I fulfilled it by being in the jazz band, a student play, or some such approach that shows better on college application. Further, my mom and dad did not want me wasting my time in soft subjects. They took away from one more AP course.”
Barton paints a scene for his students of what learning looks like in high school. He says, “When you took AP chemistry, I would guess the teacher told you that you needed 95 points for an A and valued every assignment and test. Further, he/she gave a possible 120 points if you came in early and helped set up the lab or stayed late to wash beakers. Thus you could do C work and still get an A in the class. Further, all tests were scantron forms with no essays or explanatory elements and your lab reports were on a form outlined by the instructor.” His students look at him like he had been in their class alongside them, and they all nod their heads yes.
Then Barton tells his students how his class will be different: “I tell them accuracy and exactness are not important but process and reflection are. That I expect them to break the rules and to climb up to the highest branch and saw it off behind them. I tell them that risk and open-ended problems are what we do in design. Design is a problem-solving methodology not a ‘task’ and this will be hard because they have only had tasks so far in their education. Because they are Stanford students they do not freak out, but the stress level rises. But this is what they thirst for and they then embrace it. It takes a little time for them to stop asking if they can do X. My response is either ‘ask for forgiveness not permission’ or ‘can you?’ By week five some group of students will answer for me with one of those responses. That is when I know I have brought them to the human side of education.”
Barton isn’t letting his students “do school.” He’s teaching them to think. But with some he has quite an uphill battle.
TEACH THEM TO PERSIST AT THINKING
Of all the things that comprise our kids’ lives, their academic pursuits and progress seem to be the most intense crucible, and the present methods and approaches to teaching children emphasize memorizing and regurgitating information and getting good grades on homework, exams, and standardized tests. Often we meet their positive results with comments like “You’re so smart!” But research shows that such feedback from parents actually undermines academic success rather than enhances it.
Stanford psychology professor Dr. Carol Dweck is the internationally recognized pioneer of the concept of “growth mindset” as a way to continually grow, learn, and persevere in our efforts.14 Dweck found that kids who are told they’re “smart” actually underperform in subsequent tasks, by choosing easier tasks to avoid evidence that they are not smart, which Dweck calls having a “fixed mindset.” In contrast, Dweck found, kids who are praised not for their smarts but for their effort—with praise specific to the effort made, and not overblown—develop what Dweck calls a “growth mindset.” They learn that their effort is what led to their success, and if they continue to try, over time they’ll improve and achieve more things. These kids end up taking on tougher things, and feel better about themselves. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” Dweck has explained.15 “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”16
Dweck’s website, mindsetonline.com, teaches a step-by-step approach to developing “growth mindset.”15 She says, “How you interpret challenges, setbacks, and criticism is your choice. You can interpret them in a fixed mindset as signs that your fixed talents or abilities are lacking. Or you can interpret them in a growth mindset as signs that you need to ramp up your strategies and effort, stretch yourself, and expand your abilities. It’s up to you.” A growth mindset is all about being motivated to persist at figuring things out and it leads to better critical thinking.
TEACH THEM TO THINK ABOUT MORE THAN THEMSELVES
A kid’s academic and extracurricular lives and personal matters seem to be all there’s time to think about these days. But you can also develop critical thinking in kids by talking about what’s going on in the world around them and encouraging them to form an opinion about things.
Educators and psychologists have a mantra these days: No matter how hectic the schedules of your family members may be, make time to have dinner together. Research shows that family dinners help kids feel they matter to the parent, and as a result they have a positive impact on kids’ mental health and lead to greater self-esteem and greater academic achievement. In addition to talking to our kids about their day or their lives, talking to them about current events scales the level of critical thinking up a level—to a level of theoretical challenge, to a degree of interest in the world around them, and to a degree of humility about what they don’t yet know. It makes them hungry to know more.
Once your kid is in elementary school, they can express opinions and be challenged as to what they believe. You get to decide which issues are appropriate topics for your family, given your interests, beliefs, values, and the ages of your children. Here is how you can engage in a conversation about current events so as to develop stronger thinking skills in your kid.
1. Come up with a topic about which there are different perspectives. It could be from a book you’ve read, a movie you’ve seen, a television show you watch as a family, a school policy, an issue in your local newspaper, or a topic with which the local PTA or school board is concerned. As long as there are at least a few differing, reasonable perspectives, the conversation will work. Present the issue at an age-appropriate level, erring on the side of what your elementary schooler can stretch to understand.
2. Ask your kid what they think. Ask what they think about the topic, and why they think what they think. On what values or prior assumptions do they base their opinions? What do they think would happen if their perspective did not win out? What would be the consequences? Why would things be better if their perspective did win out?
3. Play devil’s advocate. Whichever “side” your kid took, now it’s your turn to play devil’s advocate. This means you express the counter opinion, in about the same amount of words your kid used to express their opinion. Tell why this is the better point of view, on what values or assumptions you base this opinion, and the consequences of your view being adhered to or not. Be encouraging and playful, not demanding or overly critical.
4. Encourage your kid to respond to your point of view. Encourage them to come up with a reason they didn’t state when they presented the issue first time around. Gauge your kid’s readiness and willingness to engage in this intellectual banter and don’t push it beyond their comfort zone. (I know some grown women whose father—a lawyer—pushed them to the point of tears in dinner table conversations where they had to defend their point of view. Don’t go that far!)
5. FOR THE ADVANCED: Switch sides. Now start over, reversing roles, and see if your kid can articulate the argument and values underlying the perspective that is against their original point of view. Or start with a new topic and when your kid says what they initially think, stop them and challenge them to start arguing from the other point of view.
Having family dinner conversation about events in the world isn’t just a great way to achieve stimulating dinner conversations in your house each night. In The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, Amanda Ripley explains that around the world the kids whose parents engaged them in conversation about books, movies, and current events scored better on the reading portion of the international PISA test.
LET THEM SPEAK UP FOR THEMSELVES
In an earlier chapter (Chapter 3, “Being There for Them”), I included a vignette about a Stanford freshman who came with his parents to talk to me about doing research while at Stanford. In our meeting, the parents did all of the talking, even though I posed questions directly to the kid and redirected my eye contact to him as often as possible. At the end of our twenty-minute conversation, I couldn’t tell what, if anything, the kid was thinking about the matter, or whether he was interested in doing research at all. It was just clear that his parents were very interested in the topic.
My daughter, Avery, told me a story from the sixth grade, when she’d been selected to be in the group of students who would show visiting fifth graders around the middle school. Instead of letting the sixth graders speak to the fifth graders, however, the teacher involved in the effort ended up doing all of the talking. Then he turned to the sixth graders standing beside him to see if they had anything to add. They didn’t—except that he’d gotten the location of the library wrong, as it would be moved before the fifth graders arrived and they’d been instructed to discuss its new location. Avery and her friends just stood there, smiling, trying to look responsible and important, but feeling instead like idiots. What was the teacher so afraid would happen if he’d let the sixth graders actually speak for themselves?
We have to get out of our kid’s way and let them speak up for themselves in the world. Here are my thoughts as to how.
1. Value it. Your child needs to be able to think for themselves and to be able to initiate and respond to conversation with the people they’ll meet. Whether it’s exciting news to share, an explanation of their interests or desires, or a problem that needs to be raised, your kids will need to be able to handle these things completely by themselves one day, and childhood is meant to offer practice.
2. Make a goal for yourself. Decide that you will let your child speak for him- or herself whenever possible, and increasingly so as they—and you—gain confidence in their abilities. Every time you succeed, you’re telling your child you believe in their capacity to think for themselves.
3. Practice it. When you know your kid is going to be talking to an adult about something—say, the coach of their team, or the leader of a camp at which they’d like to work—let them know in advance that you want them to do the talking, that you know they can handle it, and that you’ll be there to fill in any information they don’t have. Teachers, store clerks, dance teachers, and coaches alike love when a child can come to them with a question, idea, or concern. Let your child see the joy on the face of the adult with whom they’re talking. Caveat: You know your kid best—if your kid is introverted or shy, they may welcome your doing the heavy lifting for them, and if they have special needs, they may need you to do so. But even if you’re speaking for your kid, be mindful that you are not them and are not literally able to speak for them. You can say, “Jasmine told me she’s feeling…” or “Jordan told me he’s interested in…”
4. Resist, resist, resist! Instead of nudging them to speak or whispering in their ear, resist the urge to step in. Give them the chance to do it for themselves. At a store, or with an instructor or coach, you might even physically hang back and avoid eye contact so that it’s clear to the adult that your child will be doing the talking.
5. Add your thoughts when necessary. Until they are grown, chances are you will always know more than they do about a subject, and you will always have your own opinion and thoughts on the matter. Your thoughts matter, but as additions to whatever your child wants to say, not instead of. Like a good manager in the workplace, let the junior person in the room (your kid) speak first, then support what they’ve said, adding only what you feel is essential. This empowers them.
THEIR THINKING, THEIR LIFE
Every Friday afternoon at Stanford I held office hours where, in thirty-minute increments over the course of three hours, I’d hear from students who wanted advice about academic and personal matters, such as the choice of major or grad school, a set of competing summer opportunities, or which classes or activities to drop in order to have a bit more breathing room or to pursue other things. Whatever their question, I’d respond with questions of my own, such as, “Why do you think you want this versus that?” “How will your long-term plans be impacted, and why?” “What would you lose if you didn’t do that, and why?” “What would you do if you could do whatever you wanted, and why?” By inquiring further in various ways, multiple times, I peeled back the layers surrounding my students’ question. I was conducting the kind of continual questioning critical dialogue we discussed earlier in this chapter.
Sure, I had my opinions on the various matters my students presented to me, but it wasn’t my job to come up with answers. My job was to ask a student good questions that opened her further to her self. I’d try to tease out the values underlying her ideas, her sense of her own strengths and areas for development, and her fears and her dreams. Then I’d help her interrogate the choices available in light of what she knew of her self. I was teaching her to develop a rationale for the choice she would ultimately make, rather than letting her fall back on the advice from an authority figure (me) or the rationale that she “should” do such and such because “everyone else is” or because “it’s expected that I will,” which often tumbles out of the mouths of young adults. It was both humbling and exciting to be in the presence of a human unfolding, thinking for herself, figuring things out.
In The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, Amanda Ripley writes about the dismal level of critical thinking ability in American teenagers, but she also reported on the various pockets around our country where better teaching and learning occurs, and students score extremely high on the PISA. Ripley concludes with optimism: “Without a doubt, American teenagers can perform at the top of the world on a sophisticated test of critical thinking.”17 Through better teaching and better parenting, we can give them the chance.