Helping Your Child Develop Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking skills are important to your child’s development. Using them and practicing them will help to develop keen problem solving skills. This will help make them grow into a responsible and independent young adult. With the help of a Boarding School in Hertfordshire, here are some suggestions as to how you can help your child develop those vital critical thinking skills.

Let Them Play

Playing with a number of different toys, from action figures to building blocks, can help your child practice critical thinking skills in a way where they don’t even notice that’s what they’re doing. Testing how things work informally is crucial, and seeing how certain toys react to certain decisions they make (be it ‘what floats in water’, whether this piece fits here etc), will help your child learn new things about cause and effect, with their imagination leading the way.

Ask Your Child Why

Time to get revenge for your children asking incessant questions! Asking questions is important for inspiring your child to be inquisitive and think about the world around them. When your child presents a problem or an opinion, ask them why they think that is the way it is, or why they think that way. It will inspire them to think more deeply about why they feel the way they do about certain things in their mind, which in turn will help them engage critical thinking skills to make them a more self-aware individual.

Don’t Solve All Their Problems

Your instinct might be to swoop in and save the day whenever your child has a problem that they’re facing, be it personal, practical or school related. Try your best to resist that urge, and give your children the space to think about their problems and see if they can solve them themselves. You can steer them in the right path, but when children figure out their problems by themselves, that will help them trust their critical thinking skills, as well as boost their self esteem.