Strategies to Raise Critical Thinkers in the Modern Age with Julie Bogart

Critical thinking is more than just about evaluating others’ arguments; it begins with self-awareness, says Julie Bogart.

"We can't think well, if we don't understand the source of authority that drives our own thinking," offers the CEO of Brave Writer, during an interview with Lianne Castelino of whereparentstalk.stagingserver.cloud/.

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Welcome to where parents talk. My name is Lianne Castelino.
Our guest today is the CEO of Brave Writer, and a thought leader in homeschooling. Julie Bogart is also an author, and creator of an online Writing Program, serving more than 190 countries over more than 20 years. Her latest book is called becoming a critical thinker, a workbook to help students think well, in an age of disinformation, Julie is also a mother of five. And she joins us today from Cincinnati, Ohio. Welcome, and thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having me. Lianne.
This student workbook that you’ve just recently published, follows on the heels of a book that you wrote in 2022, called Raising critical thinkers. And that, yeah, and that’s geared towards parents, this current book is a workbook for students. Let’s start, Julie, by having you describe how you define critical thinking.
I love when we start there, critical thinking to me is all about self awareness. So in most venues, people think critical thinking is the ability to critique someone else’s ideas. But what I discovered as I spent time in education is that what’s missing in most of our thinking, is our own awareness of our biases, when those get kicked into gear, when we’re triggered by an idea and are resistant to it. In other words, we can’t think well, if we don’t understand the source of authority that drives our own thinking. So critical thinking to me is the capacity to recognize your own bias as it kicks into gear to evaluate data evidence and understand its sources of authority before you start critiquing someone else. Once you can do that, then yes, you can examine ideas.
It’s such a great starting point. And we’re going to unpack what you just said, because there’s a lot in there. But I’m curious as to why you believe raising a critical thinker with those attributes that you just described is important today.
Well, of course, we have social media and the internet, which we all complain about constantly, because we don’t like this idea that our minds and our values and our beliefs are being flooded with information and disinformation. And we find it more and more difficult to sort through that our kids seem to be even more ill equipped. But what I’ve noticed, actually, is that in this current era, where we are all very aware that information we get may not be accurate, we are all starting to actually evaluate our sources of authority in a much more rigorous way. So I think this moment is especially poised because of the rise of AI, artificial intelligence, the large language models like chat GPT, the capacity to sort through what we can trust and what we can’t trust is a vital skill for anyone and particularly, or children, who will eventually be working in jobs and having to deal with that kind of, you know, firehose of information every day.
So much to wade through, it’s a daunting task for any of us to think about living in the knowledge age. And how do we trust what we’re seeing, reading, hearing listening to? So where is an appropriate place for a parent to start to ultimately help their child wade through this as well?
TSo glad you asked that question. When we talk about critical thinking adults always think about politics, social issues, and religion. But critical thinking actually starts from the time your child is born. Most of us adopt our values through two main lenses, we start as an individual with our own perceptions, and those drive us to act. So from the time you’re born, you’re crying because you’re hungry. That is an expression of a desire, and you aren’t sifting through whether or not that’s inconvenient to your mother, you’re simply expressing this is my need. This is my perception. But what we don’t often acknowledge is that the individual perceptions that we develop over our lifetimes, get modified by the communities that we’re a part of, and that is another lens for how we form our beliefs. And those communities actually exert a force against our perception. So for instance, a baby wants to eat whenever it’s hungry. But the family that first community they’re a part of is on a propaganda campaign to convince that baby, that eventually you’ll be eating only three times a day with a snack, right? And we don’t just continue to only eat whenever we feel like it. We have this logic story that we feed to our children. That is food comes three times a day, not 25 times a day. And we’re going to talk you into it, we’re gonna model it, we’re going to convince you that this perception you have needs to be subordinated to this community value. Well, in a family, some of these are so natural and so obvious, you know, potty training, learning to dress yourself. These all seem like they aren’t propaganda, they’re just good sense. But the longer that we live, and the more communities we join, those communities are interpreting that overwhelming experience of being an individual into a system that helps us feel like we belong. And we know how to live and operate. So what parents can do is avoid the temptation to constantly modify a child’s perceptions. I would like parents to be more curious. So here’s a good example. Let’s say you’ve got like a seven year old child, it’s time for dinner and you say, hey, go wash your hands, let’s eat dinner, and your child says, I don’t want to wash my hands. Most parents of my generation see that as a authority contest, parent will say you have to I said, so this is the end of the discussion. And so now the child is subordinating. All the reasons they didn’t want to wash their hands under this authority that’s telling them they have to anyway, in the current model of parenting, sort of this millennial and Gen X group, what a lot of them have done, instead of this authoritarian control, they’ve done what they call cooperation by explanation. So what they’ll do is they’ll say, Well, you know, science says there are germs on your hands, you can’t see them. But if you ingest them, you’re gonna get sick. What they’ve actually done is doubled down on authority. They’ve said not only do you have to do it, because I’m saying so but now science that you’ve never read, haven’t done, it is also confirming that I’m right, and you’re wrong. What I tell parents all the time is even though giving explanations feels like you’re empowering your child, what you’re really doing is training them to trust and authority, even authorities they haven’t vetted. So what I prefer is once a month, you can’t do this every day, I know you’re busy. When your child resists you or dissents go down that rabbit hole. Oh, you don’t want to wash your hands? Why is that? Find out what’s driving that it might just be they want more time on the computer, and they don’t want to disengage? It might be that they think the water is too hot. And you’ve never thought about the water being too hot or too cold? Could you get a thermometer and test different temperatures to see which one they can tolerate? Could you look up other ways to get rid of germs? Like maybe with a blow dryer and heat instead of hand washing? But what if even at the base of all this, your child just doesn’t believe hand washing makes a difference? Could you interrogate your own belief? Maybe that child saw you in Target yesterday, and the baby sister spit out a pacifier. And that child watched you pick it up off a dirty floor? Suck the dirt off it into your own mouth and pop it back in that baby’s mouth? Could your child on some level see this as an empty, meaningless ritual that you yourself haven’t interrogated yet? I mean, do we wash our hands every time we eat a snack? We don’t. So is hand washing required. So part of what I hope parents will do is allow kids to dissent, to gather their own data and experiences to challenge the authority of a parent’s take. And for the parent to actually reframe their own understanding of that belief, like to actually interrogate it for a moment. How much do I believe this? Is this something that was just passed on to me that I’ve never critically examined? So like, that
was such an interesting perspective, it makes complete sense, the way you lay it out and explain it, it seems rational. But I can hear parents who watch or listen to this interview saying, I just don’t think I have that kind of time, I’d be debating every single thing that we’re doing all day long. So in other words, it’s a fine balance. So how do you as a parent, strike a balance? And can you provide an example similar to what you provided, but for the tween teen total ease of life, because they’re then designed at that point to challenge you on just about everything naturally, right?
Perfect. We’ll take them one at a time. So first of all, even at the top, I said, Do this once a month with a child, right? When they’re climbing in the car seat, and they’re saying I hate car seats. You have to get somewhere you’re gonna strap them in, they may not like it. But you might revisit that at bedtime. You might say, you know, I remember that. You said you didn’t like car seats. And I want to know more about that. I want to talk about this with you. You can’t do it every day for everything. But here’s what’s really fascinating. We don’t do it at all. We literally look over their heads and we insist and we get irritated when they won’t cooperate and we think we’ve given them this friendly, nice explanation. And all of it just feels like coercion. So if once in a while you Surprise your child by being curious and actually giving support or validity to their perspective, the whole dynamic starts shifting. And these stop being such contact contests. And it won’t take as long the second and third time, because now they know that you are actually curious and interested, and you’re going to go on this journey together, you’ll be amazed, they’ll come up sometimes with their own solutions, because the thing they were worried about isn’t the thing you’re explaining against, right? So that’s the first one. Now teens are in a slightly different category, mostly because younger kids are more naturally cooperative. They want to please their parents, you can insist and they will swallow their feelings that do with the family program is teens really want to find out? Can I dissent? Am I in a cult? Or am I in a group of people that have the capacity to think about ideas differently than I do? I’ll give you an example. From my own family. I have a son who’s about 16 at the time, and there was a ballot measure in Ohio that he was really excited about, but he wasn’t old enough to vote. So he got all of this data together for me. And just so you know, he’s a human rights lawyer today. So this is very much like his personality. And he made this case. And I listened. And I asked questions, and I was so interested, and I validated what he put together. And at the end, he said, So are you going to vote? Yes. I said, Actually, I’m going to vote no. And tears sprang from his eyes. And he said, Mom, I count on you to be logical. And I said, Oh, honey, everything you said, actually supports your position. You didn’t account for these three things I’m thinking about and because you didn’t ask they didn’t come up. I don’t need you to account for them right now. But what you expressed is logically coherent, I get why you hold that view. And my thought is, eventually your side’s going to win. But right now, these are the three reasons and do you want to account for them, which he couldn’t, because he didn’t even know those reasons existed. And naturally, this ballot measure has now passed about a decade later. So he was even in the trajectory of where it was going. But it was a moment for me to be able to say, you’re okay in my family, having this completely different position than me. And I can even honor and value why that position is meaningful to you and still not hold it myself. agreement is not the goal, it is the capacity to actually hold a position and not be shamed. Kicked out, I’ve seen families actually ex commute, communicate children over having positions they don’t agree with. And that’s the danger in the teen years, is that you actually push this parental propaganda program too far, and you alienate your child, instead of creating a community of thinkers.
It’s interesting, because building on that point, and you’re talking about an example that involves society, and that ballot example that you shared, but you’re seeing what you’re talking about play out in real time, all over the place these days. Yeah, and it becomes such a lot of noise and, and louder noise as the days roll along. So if parents and adults are struggling to parse through this and make sense of it, and fact check and research, and you know, all the things that you need to do to make sure that it’s the truth, right? How can we then plausibly expect them to decode that for their kids.
And here’s the thing, they’re going to wade into some waters that are propaganda conspiracy theories, that same son at one point got very interested in a YouTube video that I knew was flat out conspiracy theory, lunacy. But what I found fascinating was, it was the first time he had an alternative way of thinking about how the world worked. And we want that we want kids to be able to challenge the status quo thinking that has been handed down to them that is part of becoming an educated person. So rather than just bashing the content, I sat with him and watched it, we talked about it, we clicked on some of the sources, we looked at it together. It’s really why I wrote becoming a critical thinker because I actually give you tools that you can use to sort of vet information sources, your own sort of biased thinking that kicks into gear. And one of the first chapters in raising critical thinkers, and also in becoming a critical thinker is called says who? And I use the illustration of the three little pigs story. Most of you remember it, there’s a big bad wolf. He blows down the houses eats the pigs. Everybody hates him, right. You you think of him as big and bad. Well, John Cheska, back in 1985, wrote a book called The True Story of the three little pigs written by A wolf. And this wolf does his own defense of why what he did was not only wrong, but has been grossly misunderstood. Now for parents everywhere, we all laughed at this book because it was an obvious parody. But on the flip side for small children, and I’ve interviewed many millennials who remember that book, they couldn’t differentiate between the sort of standard version that we all know which we don’t know if it’s true, it’s a fairy tale. It’s fiction. But it’s told from a deliberate viewpoint that makes the wolf bat, it was their first exposure to the idea that a story can have multiple versions. And that’s really our goal with teens. It’s not to camp on any one position. It’s to imagine what I call the rhetorical imagination. Imagine yourself into someone else’s viewpoint. How does it logically cohere? What are the sources of data experience and anecdote that they use for this to feel logical to them. And for our teens, in particular, they are a lot of them more savvy than even my Boomer generation is, because they are aware that information can be modified, edited, and tweaked. You know, when I was growing up, I didn’t know that was happening. It just seemed like the nightly news was presenting the facts. So we’re in a really volatile era, but it’s also one where kids are awake, they know what’s going on, they are curious about it, they want to know, it’s
such an important point that you’re bringing up, because the fact is, we wouldn’t really be having this conversation. If we weren’t living in the times we’re living in with exposure to knowledge everywhere, you know, in the palm of our hands in the, in the form of smartphones, etc. So what would you say to a parent who perhaps, has been a little late to the game and is really struggling with technology, and really doesn’t think this is important? My kids will figure it out, they go to a good school, the teachers will sort it out? What would you say to them? That this is important for them to understand critical thinking and how to impart that on their kids? Why would you answer that?
Well, first of all, I think you have a much richer, more satisfying life, if you can think, well, the solutions to our problems require us to include more viewpoints, our culture is polarized, because we are built on what I would call the missionary model. Everybody is an evangelist to convert people who don’t want what you’re offering to what you’re offering. And that model fails, it is not an effective tool for creating movements or solutions. Because what you’re saying is discard those things that were important to you, in order to embrace what I say is important. But if we’re going to create solutions that last, we have to include everyone’s viewpoint. So I have two ideas for you. The first one is a family one. The second one is how to approach a social issue. So in the family, you’ve got, let’s say teens who really want to be on video games all day, all night, right? And then you have parents who are like, I’ve read the data, it’s bad for you, I’m not gonna let you how do we solve this problem? Do we just lean on science? Do we just lean on parental authority? Or do we just give up and let our kids do whatever they want? I say, let’s get all the reasons on the table. So when I first asked my teenager as another son, he wanted to play video games to like three in the morning. I thought that wasn’t good. on school nights. I had a very traditional view of of school. And I asked him, Why, why can’t you just be done at 11? Can’t you just play from in the afternoons and evenings why until three in the morning, I found out his favorite gaming buddy lived in Croatia. And this was a time they could both be on at the same time. That was insanely reasonable. Then I thought, well, who is this relation guy? Is he real? Yes. So we went down the rabbit hole to establish that he was real. This was the time they liked playing. Could I trust my son to evaluate whether or not his body was getting enough sleep? At the time he was homeschooled. So he’s like, Mom, I can just sleep in and start homeschool later. Oh my gosh, that seems so reasonable. But for some reason, I wasn’t willing to find that out initially. I wanted to just put my superior information on him. So what we ended up doing is starting school later, he made sure that he did the schoolwork he was supposed to do his gaming time was later in the day and at night, so he could be with his friends. And it was a solution that met all of our needs. I think so often we’re in these zero sum high stakes dynamics, where where it’s my way or the highway or your way and I’ll get out of the way, but that’s not really the best solution. We struggled with video gaming and screen time the whole time. I had five kids one computer, I think we went through 15 different iterations of solutions. You have to be Be willing to recognize that you’re not just going to problem solve one time. So that’s kind of a family solution. But if we think about it, like in the political landscape in school, you’ll have like a 10th grade teacher Social Studies, and they’ll say, let’s debate gun rights. And then what they’ll do is they’ll divide the class in half, and they’ll say you should be pro gun rights, you should be gun restriction. Come up with your cases, we’ll have a debate and then everyone will hear both sides. But are there only two sides to these stories? My thought is in a class of 30, you would say how many of you have parents in the military? We find out? How many of you have parents in law enforcement? We find out? How many of you have family members who’ve been victims of gun violence? We find out how many of you live in parts of the city, where gun violence is common? How many of you don’t how many never held a gun, never seen a gun, don’t know a gun. Right? Stir up all of the attachments around guns. hear all of those stories before we even start talking about issues. And then when we get to what the key criteria is for thinking about gun rights, like background checks, types of guns, ballistics, public spaces, when we start doing those, figure out how many of these viewpoints the hunter, the law enforcement and the victim? How many of those can we account for in the solution we’re offering? That’s what creates it’s not just bipartisan, it’s multi perspectival solutions. And this is what has staying power when we think that way. But I always say the revolution has started the living room because schools are still on this idea of right answers. There’s one answer all 30 students will arrive at it, because the teachers decided it and that has created this crisis. I think we’re in amplified, of course, by the internet and social media.
When we talk about schools, because it’s such an important point, our kids spend, you know, 789 hours there daily. What do you believe needs to happen when it comes to teaching critical thinking in schools? And I asked this question because many schools, it is used as a marketing tool as a sales tool to entice right into entice parents to send their kids there. But at the at a granular level, what is going on in the classroom, to impart critical thinking skills to these kids?
What should that look like? Yeah, so
I was interviewed not too long ago by someone who, that’s their mission to bring critical thinking into schools. But what I discovered the longer we talked, the idea was to simply keep subverting, like the status quo answers like to get people to think beyond which is a good starting place. But actually, the problem I think, with most school training, is that kids have been, they’ve been inculcated in this system that the teacher knows the right answers, and their grades are dependent on those right answers. multiple choice testing has been proven to be very difficult for kids who come with different sets of experiences and backgrounds because of language because of the way the teacher architects the test. So I saw a study about Finland just the other day, and they almost use no standardized testing, no multiple choice testing, everything is either short answer or oral. And the goal is for students to actually think through for themselves the answer, not guess, based on for answers, and then picking the one they think might be right, but actually being able to generate their own vocabulary to describe what they know. So in schools, the first place to start, in my opinion, is with helping them understand the idea of viewpoint. Where does viewpoint come from? How many different ones do we have in this room? How many different ways would there be to answer this one question? What criteria would one person use that would be different than someone else’s to come up with a meaningful answer? Now give an example in my book, there was a multiple choice test that says, what unit of length would you use to measure this? And there’s an illustration of a tree? The answer choices were feet, centimeters, kilometers and courts. And the right answer was supposedly feet, because the teacher had in mind that the student would imagine a tree in a forest that was tall, but one of her students, a friend of mine, it was her son, he selected centimeters because he was measuring the illustration on the page. And it all it said was this and there’s the illustration. So now what are we asking students to do? To guess their way into the imagination of the adult? Or to be able to defend the answer that made sense and is logical and by the way, is even accurate is unit of length centimeter. could be used even for a tall tree. They’re both units of length. Those are the kinds of things that we want to help our kids start to notice that when we come to any subject area, it’s multifaceted. It is not just a list of correct answers.
So along those lines,
then what trends have any are you observing, that give you pause that concern you when it comes to critical thinking and how that’s being taught in the world, whether it’s at home, in the school or elsewhere? So
some critical thinking courses are actually designed to be apologetics. So there’s a difference between thinking well, and apologetics. apologetics is where you start with a premise. This is what I believe is true. Now I’m gonna go find all the supporting information to prove it’s true. But critical thinking doesn’t start with a conclusion. It starts with a question. I want to know more about. I don’t know enough about this. So is climate change real might be a question as opposed to climate change is real. Here’s all the data or climate change isn’t real. Here’s all the data. And we do this all the time. It’s very common in religion to have apologetics, but I see it across the board. We don’t start with curiosity, we typically start with an assertion, and then we go and find research for it. So for high school, I think one of the most valuable essay formats that never gets taught is the exploratory essay, which we teach in our school, in our online classes. And the reason for that is we want to teach kids how to do the research, read the research, and think about the research, not just hunt and peck through the research for the data and the facts that will support the thesis that they felt required to generate before they know anything about the topic.
Really interesting. When you look at it through that lens, it’s a completely different mission and a different outcome. Certainly, Julie, you chose to homeschool all five of your children starting back in the early 80s, when it was not something that people even had probably heard about, for the most part. I’m curious as to why you chose to, to homeschool your kids. And if the homeschooling has had an impact on their critical thinking skills across their their lives.
Wow, great question. So first, I just want to say my kids started being born in 87. So I’m a 90s homeschooler. And here’s what I know at the time. I had a phenomenal public school education in the 1970s. In California, I was raised in Los Angeles. And I was in a school district that, ironically, was in Malibu Canyon. So I had hippies, I had ex Peace Corps volunteers, first generation, right. And they were very experimental in their methods. But the thing that I really cherished about my education is that I felt like it was in my body. It wasn’t just a bunch of information that I had actively participated in CO creating it. And that what I learned was still with me today. And as I went off to college at UCLA, I ended up being a teaching assistant in a school in Brentwood. That was a busing school for desegregation. And what I saw in that school really worried me, it was, first of all, not a successful desegregating project, you know, LA has come a long way since then. But it was also very outcome based. And there was this loss of sort of creativity and personal meaning making that seems so important to me. So when I started reading about homeschooling in the 80s, I was drawn to it, I thought, Oh, maybe I can protect and preserve what I had in school, through homeschooling, which is really backwards, you don’t hear that very often. And part of what was joyful about homeschooling was reading aloud to my kids. So I had the opportunity to select a wide variety of books. And it was their provocative questions that drove so much of what we learned, because they would ask me things I didn’t know the answers to. And we would have to all go on this project together. By the time they were in high school, some of my cherished beliefs that I had been very full of effort trying to inculcate into them completely crashed and burned because they were resistant. And I famously tell in my other book, The brave learner, a story of how I tried to restrict and regulate my oldest son’s listening to music habits, what books he would read. And it resulted in a massive, terrible parenting moment between my husband, me and my son. And it was in that moment that I really had to pivot and realize I don’t have control over this mind. I gotta get curious about this mind. He’s listening to Rage Against the Machine for a reason. Let’s look at the lyrics. My own mother, who was his grandmother was more curious about the music he was listening to than I was because she had learned that the way you grow hell But the person is to know about their interiors, not to drive all that underground, but to be in connection. So that was really the beginning for me. And I would say that my five kids are amazing thinkers. I’ve learned so much from them. They all have, you know, develop their own professions and traveled the world and speak different languages. And yeah, I’m humbled by them every day.
What a wonderful story.
Julie, let me ask you what was the impetus for writing, raising critical thinkers, and then this workbook? And also what do you want readers to take away from from these pieces?
Thank you. So raising critical thinkers has been like a 30 year project for me. I didn’t know when I started, but I hopped online in my mid 30s. Join this homeschool discussion board with all this, you know, married white, religiously similar, politically similar women. And we found ourselves in online blood baths over who was destroying the planet faster parents with Pampers or parents with cloth diaper services. We argued about VBACs and breastfeeding, we talked about our political perspectives and our religious doctrines. And no one agreed. I mean, we were nice to each other sometimes. But sometimes it was a full on troll war, you know. And I started not asking the question, who was right? I was wondering, why do we all think we’re right? Why does each person think I can make an assertion, wrap my source of authority, and everyone will fall in line. And when I started realizing is that’s the training from school. And the more I looked at the way school treats us that way, the more I saw that internet was going to go down this horrible direction. Because it’s obvious to me that we all believe that all we have to do is cite one source of authority, and everyone will agree. But we don’t all share the same sources of authority. So I started being curious about how do we grow those skills, not only in our children, but for ourselves? And then how do we live in a different way with each other online. I have an online community with my company called Brave learner home. And we’ve never had an argument over anything political, no social issue, and everyone from all perspectives is welcome. Because we come with this other way of addressing the world. We’re not there in conversion mindset. So it’s a big change. And I wrote this book, because parents often think they’re good critical thinkers. In fact, almost every radio show I’ve ever been on, especially the ones run by men. They always think I’m of the same political persuasion as them. And they’re like, Thank God, you wrote this book for those other people. And my hope is that we’ll all discover how far we have to go. You know, when I’m reading Facebook, I’m like everyone else, I suddenly feel smug, annoyed, I think I’m superior to people. This is just the human condition. But now those are my critical thinking tells I know, oh, no, I’m not thinking well, in this moment. I’m just defaulting to groupthink to my team, to cheerleading my ideas. Critical thinking requires that pause. So I wrote raising critical thinkers to help parents get good at it, their activities, they can do it their kids ages five to 18. So that’s in here, too. And then my publisher said, What about excuse me, my publisher said, What about teenagers? Could you write something for them? So we came up with, it’s more like a journal sort of like the artists way, you know, but it’s a workbook for them, to have the privacy, to think about their own thinking, to not have to always do that in public, to examine a view without someone telling them they’re wrong.
Certainly such an important area of discussion of practice of awareness, as you mentioned at the outset, given the global world we live in, given the knowledge that we’re all exposed to Julie Bogart. Thank you so much for taking time to share your insight with us today.
Thank you for having me.

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“Critical thinking to me is the capacity to recognize your own bias as it kicks into gear — to evaluate data, evidence and understand its sources of authority — before you start critiquing someone else. Once you can do that, then yes, you can examine ideas,” Bogart says.

An authority on homeschooling, mother of five and author of Raising Critical Thinkers, Bogart unpacks what true critical thinking skills should entail and how parents can help their kids foster this critical competency in navigating both personal and global challenges —especially in an era where artificial intelligence (AI) and social media often create conflicting narratives.

“In this current era, where we are all very aware that information we get may not be accurate, we are all starting to actually evaluate our sources of authority in a much more rigorous way,” adds Bogart.

“The large language models like chat GPT, the capacity to sort through what we can trust and what we can’t trust is a vital skill for anyone and particularly our children, who will eventually be working in jobs and having to deal with that kind of firehose of information every day.”

For Younger Children

Critical thinking should start early, and be shaped by a child’s individual experiences and community values.

“What we don’t often acknowledge is that the individual perceptions that we develop over our lifetimes get modified by the communities that we’re a part of, and that is another lens for how we form our beliefs,” says Bogart.  “And those communities actually exert a force against our perception.”

As such, Bogart encourages parents to engage toddlers and young children in meaningful conversations, even over seemingly simple issues like bedtime disagreements. Revisiting conflicts during calmer moments and validating their perspectives fosters collaboration and reduces future resistance.

As children grow, their curiosity expands into questioning societal norms and family values.

Bogart advises leaning into these debates rather than shutting them down. For example, she supported her teenage son’s exploration of political beliefs, even when they clashed with her own, teaching him that disagreement doesn’t equal disconnection.

These respectful dialogues can be critical in nurturing confidence and critical thinking while preserving family bonds.

Navigating the Knowledge Age: Tips for Parents

Helping children sift through today’s overwhelming information flow can feel daunting. Bogart recommends these simple practices:

• Model curiosity: Show your kids how you evaluate sources and make informed decisions.
• Explore multiple viewpoints: Analyze articles or videos together, discussing biases and credibility.
• Encourage rhetorical imagination: Challenge teens to step into opposing viewpoints to understand their logic and coherence.

She highlights how empathy can transform parental challenges. For example when Bogart’s teenage son wanted to game late into the night due to a friend’s time zone in Croatia, instead of outright denial, she explored his reasoning. By adjusting the family’s schedule and maintaining accountability, they found a solution that balanced trust and responsibility.

From Zero-Sum Thinking to Inclusivity

Too often, family dynamics feel like win-or-lose battles. Bogart’s approach emphasizes moving beyond this binary mindset to foster inclusive resolutions that meet everyone’s needs.

Beyond the Home: Critical Thinking in Schools

Bogart critiques traditional debate models in education, which often limit students to binary arguments. She advocates for teaching multiplicity—exploring diverse perspectives to craft more nuanced solutions. For instance, discussions on gun rights could include personal stories from students with varying experiences, fostering empathy and comprehensive understanding.

As for her book, Raising Critical Thinkers, Bogart calls it the culmination of a 30-year journey, designed to challenge the status quo and equip parents, educators and kids with an informed perspective on critical thinking skills development for today and into the future.

“It’s obvious to me that we all believe that all we have to do is cite one source of authority, and everyone will agree,” says Bogart.

“But we don’t all share the same sources of authority. So I started being curious about how do we grow those skills, not only in our children, but for ourselves,” adding, “the revolution has started in the living room.”