How to Raise Critical Thinkers in an Age of Disinformation and Misinformation
I’ll cut right to the chase. I’m pretty worried about our kids’ knowing what is factual, what is a complete fabrication and what is worthy of their attention. The barrage of information these days is completely overwhelming. 24 hour news cycles and always on social media means no single event can be “newsworthy” for more than a moment before the next attention grabbing headlines bumps the last into obscurity.
Not only that, but according to a recent survey by the Pew Foundation a majority of young adults and teens get their news exclusively from social media. What does that look like? A 20 second clip of a fire burning down a community, followed by a 20 second video of a cat doing a trick, followed by a 20 second video of the latest beauty trend, followed by displaced children starving in Gaza. How can anything have meaning anymore when all news is reduced to entertainment?
We are in an era where information spreads at lightning speed with no context or verification to help people assess whether it is true. Children are especially susceptible to believing what they see and hear, particularly if the message is encased in a brief, shocking or entertaining snippet - they can feel smart and informed without doing any of the work.
So, if your child has access to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, X or any other social sharing platform it’s time for some parental guidance.
The question is how can we talk to our kids about this issue without sounding dismissive or out of touch? The key is to place a tiny seed of doubt in their mind and let them do the work of uncovering whether something is credible - let’s take a look:
What you can say when your child shares questionable information:
“That’s interesting, I hadn’t heard that, where did you learn it?”
“Is that source reliable? Does that person/source know a lot about this subject?”
“Wow, that’s a big claim! Have you looked to see if others are reporting the same thing?”
“Does your source have anything to gain by you clicking on or resharing that information?”
“Is there any chance that might be fake? How would you know?”
The idea here is to engage your child’s critical thinking skills! In this day and age, none of us can be too careful about what we take as fact or truth. It’s incumbent on all of us to triple check our information before sharing it.
I teach my kids to check 3 reliable sources before assuming what they are reading/watching/hearing is true.
What makes a reliable source? Most news sources have some level of bias. Those that rank as having least bias are AP, Reuters, PBS, BBC. Of course for rumor fact checking there is always Snopes and FactCheck.org.
One last thought - if your child is in middle or high school it might be time to check in on how media literacy is addressed in their school curriculum. Schools have a unique opportunity to turn all kids into critical consumers of online content. As I always say - raising kids in the digital age takes a village - you don’t need to do all the work alone.