Contact: Kent Fischer, [email protected]
PARIS – The Reboot Foundation has released a new resource aimed at helping parents develop critical thinking in their children, right in time for the new school year. The ability to think critically and independently is vital in school and beyond. Yet many parents struggle with how to foster critical thinking in their kids.
To address that, the Reboot Foundation has released a parents’ guide to critical thinking, a skill that is vital for language and reasoning and relationship building.
The Reboot Foundation guide provides parents with a lot of information about different stages of child development and walks them through different activities they can do with their children to boost critical thinking at various ages.
For example, for parents of younger children, the guide offers insights and activities that teach children to distinguish between an opinion, an argument and a piece of evidence. For parents of adolescents, it offers suggestions and activities for helping children conduct a safe internet search. For parents of teenagers, the guide offers ideas for teaching kids how to recognize good information from bad.
“Children are so vulnerable to the wide array of distractions that can impede critical thinking today, but parents can help kids develop the kind of healthy habits of mind that will empower them to overcome these challenges and create a solid foundation for effective thinking,” said Helen Lee Bouygues, president of the Reboot Foundation.
To develop this guide, the Reboot Foundation relied on the work of global experts lead by noted researcher Sébastian Dieguez at the Laboratory for Cognitive and Neurological Sciences at the University of Fribourg. The group spent more than a year digging through the research to develop a set of age specific recommendations.
“Critical thinking habits can counter some of the negative effects of online media and allow children to reap the rewards offered by the internet while avoiding the drawbacks,” says Bouygues.
