How to Teach Your Kids Critical Thinking (Without Losing Their Faith) w/ Kathy Gibbens | Ep. 52, Pt. 1

Episode 52: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

This episode features Kathy Gibbens discussing how to teach kids critical thinking—defined as thinking well and distinguishing good arguments from bad—from a distinctly Christian perspective that emphasizes loving God with one’s mind and seeking truth. She covers concepts like the “fallacy fallacy,” the importance of middle school as a prime time to train kids, using questions and everyday life to build discernment, and practical tools such as naming fallacies and biases. Gibbens also highlights the importance of modeling respectful disagreement, and using brief real‑life conversations (e.g., social media posts, bumper stickers, talks with grandma) to help children evaluate messages and pursue truth.

Episode Transcript

Janel Greig (00:00):
Well, welcome to Upside Down Parenting, where we explore raising kids to thrive in God’s upside down kingdom. In today’s world, our kids are constantly being shaped by messages from social media, school, and entertainment. As parents, it’s easy to focus on wanting to have the right answers, but what if one of the most important things we can do is teach our kids how to think, not just what to think.

Today, we’re excited to be joined by Kathy Gibbens from Filter It Through a Brain Cell. Kathy is passionate about equipping parents to raise kids who can engage ideas thoughtfully, discern truth from lies, and develop a faith that actually holds up under pressure. In this episode, we’re going to talk about why critical thinking matters, how it connects to a biblical worldview, and simple, practical ways you can start building these skills in your home right away. Kathy, welcome to the show.

Kathy Gibbens (00:53):
Thanks, Janel. I’m super excited to be here.

Janel Greig (00:55):
We’re thrilled to have you. Your content has been such a blessing to my family personally. We adopted our Fallacy Fridays years ago and still haven’t got through your hundreds of episodes, which is great content. And we’d utilize your brain gem too, which is great. So hopefully we’ll get a chance to share about that, but we’ll link to all your great resources in the show notes too. I love it. I love it. Yeah. And hey, Matt, how are you?

Dr. Matt Jones (01:18):
I’m all right. I am just curious, Kathy, what’s your favorite fallacy that you’ve been able to debunk?

Kathy Gibbens (01:25):
Oh my goodness. There’s so many.

Dr. Matt Jones (01:26):
Or at least a top one or two.

Kathy Gibbens (01:28):
There’s so many good ones. Okay. Can I just give you an interesting one? Yes. This is one that I see trips people up a lot, and it is called the fallacy fallacy. And the fallacy fallacy says that if somebody uses or commits a fallacy in making their argument, therefore their whole argument must be void. Well, that’s not true. Somebody can make a fallacy and still be correct.

And so this is why even, because this trips up people who have learned a little bit about the fallacies because now they can recognize them. And so they’ll pick up on one and they’ll say, oh, they committed a fallacy. But then in their head, that means therefore their entire argument must be wrong. And that’s not true.

(02:12):
Somebody can commit a fallacy and still be correct about the rest of or other parts of what it is that they’re saying. So this is where we’ve really just got to be aware of what is the goal. The goal is not to search for fallacies. The goal is to search for the truth. And we can’t just stop at one point in the road.

Dr. Matt Jones (02:35):
Okay, cool. That’s helpful. That’s a good one to start out with.

Janel Greig (02:39):
Yeah, I love it. I love it. Before we dig in a little bit more, Kathy, can you share with our listeners what actually led you to create Filter It Through a Brain Cell and focus on helping parents and kids learn critical thinking skills?

Kathy Gibbens (02:52):
Yes, I think that’s a really great place to start. So it was back in the year 2019, 2020. My daughter was in the seventh grade. I’m a homeschool mom, so I’ve been homeschooling her for all the way, we went K through 12. And part of her curriculum that year was to read this book called The Fallacy Detective. And so we read it.

And of course you guys know what happened in 2020. So that was the year that the pandemic launched and all the craziness that was happening around that. And then of course we rolled into a presidential election and all the craziness. There was so much going on in the world.

And what was fascinating to me was watching these kids, they were seventh graders and they had just been introduced to maybe, I think maybe about 30 fallacies that they get introduced to in the book, The Fallacy Detective.

(03:40):
But watching them go through that period of time, watching a presidential debate, any kind of political debate with a bunch of kids who’ve learned some fallacies, they were like, “Oh, that was an ad hominem. That was a red herring.” And they’d pick it up. They’d pick it up so quickly.

And I realized I had this kind of aha moment because I saw these kids recognizing these arguments for what they were, whereas all these adults on social media are getting swept up and they’re tumbling and they can’t even see the forest for the trees. They can’t tell a bad argument when it hits them in the face.

And I thought, oh my goodness, if we all learned just a little bit about some good critical thinking, we as a society might be in a very different place. And I also realized that this middle school age is such a good opportunity to be teaching this to kids because think about it.

(04:33):
Middle schoolers, what do they want to do? All they want to do is argue. If they say, “What time is it?” And you say, “It’s noon,” they’ll be like, “No, it’s not. It’s 11:58.” And you’re like, “Okay.” So my whole thing is, okay, this is where they’re at. This is where their brain development is at. They’re searching, they’re wanting to wrestle with what’s true and what’s right and what’s reality. And they want to catch. It’s so much fun to catch a parent saying something that’s a little bit not quite right.

And so, all right, if they want to argue and debate, let’s work with their natural inclination and teach them how to do it well and teach them how to do it in a way that’s seeking truth, not just seeking to be critical and to be criticizing. And I think if I can just pause for a minute and say, let’s define the term critical thinking as we are using it in our discussion here, because I think that’s really important.

(05:21):
So critical thinking is simply thinking well and recognizing bad thinking, bad arguments from good arguments. I had a parent ask me one time, why on earth would you want to teach your kids to be critical? And I was like, oh, this is a definition problem.

Critical thinking does not mean that we are teaching our kids to be critical of other people. It doesn’t mean we’re teaching our kids to be skeptical or to just want to argue for the sake of arguing. That’s none of it. It’s teaching kids to think well and to think accurately and giving them the tools to be able to do it.

Janel Greig (05:58):
That’s great. Can I ask a little bit of a follow-up there? Yeah, of course. And I think this helps frame it too from a biblical perspective. How do you see Jesus modeling that critical thinking or that thinking well, discernment, careful reasoning from that biblical perspective?

Kathy Gibbens (06:13):
Yeah, a couple ways. So one, he tells us the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, our soul, our strength, and our mind is included in that. And I think for a lot of us, we can kind of conceptualize what it means to love him with all of our strength and with all of our heart.

But what does it mean to love God with our mind? What does that really mean? When you sit and think about that, love God with my mind, what does that mean? Does that mean I’m studying? Yes, I think that’s part of it, but also it has to do with how we think. And scripture has a lot to say about right thinking and about how we are commanded to think rightly. It is one of the things that we are told to do.

(06:56):
It’s not just something that we’re supposed to leave up to whatever thoughts are popping through our brain. We are to actively pursue good thinking and right thinking. The other thing that Jesus did is he asked a lot of questions. And when you ask questions that guide people in thinking, that is the purpose of a question is to get somebody to think and to try to come up with either to look inside themselves and see what they’re thinking or to lead them toward maybe an answer, toward an outcome, toward something.

And I think that’s a really important thing that we as parents can take. We don’t need to just be saying all the time, “Well, here’s the answer, here’s what to think. Here’s the final. Let me just give you all the answers.” We need to exercise, help our kids exercise their own ability to think through things.

(07:49):
And the way that you do that is through a question. And that’s sometimes a little bit hard to do is to come up with questions, especially when you’re in it and you’re in your day and it’s busy and you’ve got all this stuff going on, you just want to tell the answers and just move on. But if we can stop and ask good questions, then that is a really good secret leading toward good thinking.

Dr. Matt Jones (08:11):
And we even see Jesus responding to questions with a question because he’s saying, “Okay, I appreciate your question here, but let me ask that.” And sometimes that’s frustrating for students having worked with college students for over 20 years and then being at Summit during the summers. We love questions, not afraid of questions.

But sometimes I get so excited when my kid or another student asks me a question that I want to give an answer. And sometimes the best response is, “All right, why are you asking this? What’s going on there?” Because sometimes that question is a barrier to actually the deeper question. So why do you think critical thinking is such a big deal for kids today, Kathy?

Kathy Gibbens (08:55):
Well, because there’s no shortage of information. If you look at the stats, whatever they are, I’m sure we’ve all seen different versions of them, that the society that we’re living in has access to more information than any other society has ever had than any other time in history. And so what do we do with that? How do we now make sense of it? It’s almost like we can’t slow it down. There’s no slowing down the amount of information that we are getting bombarded with.

So what do we do with it? How do we sift through it? Not only are we getting bombarded with information, but we are getting bombarded with ideas, with ideology, with what we might call a worldview. And you don’t necessarily know what the worldview is of the person that’s giving you the information.

So how are you going to sift through what you’re hearing to determine whether it’s true or not, to determine it might sound great, it might have nice music playing behind it on social media and somebody really convincing is telling you something, but does that mean it’s true?

(09:58):
And I think if we take a step back and we look at what is happening in society, what is being told is the ultimate goal here? Is the ultimate goal to feel a certain way? Is the ultimate goal to validate a certain thing? Or is the ultimate goal to find out what’s true, to know that there’s truth and to know that we can find it? And if we can instill in our kids that the ultimate goal is to find truth, is to seek what is true, that A, there is truth, B, we can know it, and C, that it is our job.

And part of how we’re created is to seek to find that. Now, okay, now we’ve given some guardrails. We are to look at and to view information through the lens of what is true and the tools that we can use to do that are critical thinking tools. Critical thinking is not the end all be all.

This is where a lot of atheists, I feel like they kind of stop, they get stuck. They just want to think, they just want to, “I’m just going to think well,” and they kind of get philosophic and whatnot, and they get stuck there. What is the end goal of thinking well? The end goal of thinking well is to know truth, is to know God, is to understand what he’s trying to do with us. And that needs to be what the tools are used for.

Dr. Matt Jones (11:13):
Those are great. And I’m wondering, what might be signs that your child, because my son was a little slow in development. I hear a lot about the frontal lobe and all those things not developing. I’m not even sure if mine’s developed yet, but what might be signs that your child is not developing critical thinking skills? And how would you go about helping them develop that if you’re recognizing those signs?

Kathy Gibbens (11:38):
Yeah. No, that’s a really good question. I think it’s one of those things that, again, you’re going to just kind of watch it as your child is developing. But if we have it in mind that every kid needs these, it just kind of goes differently developmentally.

So when a child is very young, like I’m going to say before middle school age, one of the things that you’re thinking of is you’re presenting them with different ways to think about just what’s going on with life. Because a lot of parents are like, “Okay, how do I teach my kid how to do this?” Well, when they’re young, just use life.

I come from the homeschool world and in the homeschool world, we want curriculums. What’s the curriculum for that? Or give me a good workbook or something. And for me, I’m like, “No, no, no, no. We don’t need to add to that whole burden.”

(12:20):
Let’s just use life and what we have. So even if your kid is playing with blocks or playing with Legos, just start asking them questions. “Well, why did you do that first? What would happen if you did this first? What would be another way to do it? Or what do you think would happen if we did this?” Just start getting, just the exercise of thinking about one thing in many different ways is starting to develop critical thinking.

Then when they get into the middle school world, you really want to see them wrestling with stuff. And this is the part that, again, is hard for parents because it comes across as argumentative. It comes across like they’re challenging us as parents. When you start to see them do that, that’s when they’re in this phase. They’re in this phase of, well, I’m kind of wrestling with that and I don’t know if I agree with that.

(13:05):
And I don’t know if that’s right and I’m not sure. And so I’m going to push on that a little bit or I’m going to question or I’m going to try to do it another way. And so again, we have to recognize that, okay, this is my child developing. This is him coming or her coming into this phase of development. So now how can I work with that?

And so what I always tell parents is when you see your child starting to want to argue with you or argue with their siblings or push back on maybe things that you’re telling them or trying to teach them, that’s your sign that, okay, we’re working on this critical thinking thing and let me start to give some ground rules.

The number one ground rule is how they can disagree with you and do it well. Because as parents, we have to let them exercise this and we want them exercising it with us first, but they have to do it within these certain ground rules.

(13:57):
Number one is that you do it in a respectful way. So have that conversation. What does this look like? Okay, I’m going to teach you these fallacies. If you learn these fallacies, you’re probably going to hear me commit some of them. We all do it. It just kind of happens. When that happens, yes, you are allowed to call it out with me. However, here is the way to do it properly. You can’t do it rudely. You can’t do it in front of people. Have some rules for how to do this respectfully so that we can have a conversation about it.

And then us as parents, we have to be like, oh my gosh, you’re totally right. I just committed an ad hominem. Oh, okay, here’s how I could have done that better. And you just accept it and you learn from it. We’re all learning. And move forward and teach them how to do it well.

(14:42):
And if we as parents can realize I’m learning too, I am a student right alongside my kids, well, that’s fantastic. Now you can have a conversation about anything. Anything they bring up, you’re like, wow, I don’t know. Let’s think about that. Let’s talk about that. Let me think, okay, well, here’s where I would start to think about that. And if you model it, you’re good to go. And they are going to learn so much just from watching you do that whole process yourself.

Janel Greig (15:09):
That’s great. I have a question about questions. I think as parents, most of us, maybe not most of us, maybe this is just in my household, had to learn how to ask those questions because we shout, maybe not shout either, but give direction. You’re giving, it’s controlling, it’s do this, do this. What do you recommend for parents where that isn’t a normal posture, a posture of curiosity for them? How do we develop that and kind of make that better for us as parents get better at that?

Kathy Gibbens (15:37):
Oh, that’s such a good. Because I was not naturally a good question asker either.That was something that I had to learn. And honestly, it came from two places. Number one is realizing and recognizing why questions are so important. Getting out of the, well, I said so. I’m just telling you, this is so much faster. If you just listen to what I’m saying, this will be so much faster.

But if we realize there’s a saying that I heard a long time ago, the mind convinced against their will is of the same opinion still. So if we just tell somebody something and they’re like, okay, and they’re just taking it because we said so, but they have not accepted that and brought that on for themself, they really are not changed. And so when you really look at what is learning, what is learning? It goes all the way back to that.

(16:31):
Learning is not just taking something that you tell me. Learning is actually wrestling with a thing and studying it and coming to know the truth about a thing and accepting it for yourself. Okay, well that’s very different from them just doing something because I said to do it. And when I took that step back and realized, okay, what is my real goal here? My real goal is learning.

And so I have to change. I have to look at how I’m doing things. And it feels awkward and uncomfortable. But what I had to do is I had to watch other people who were better at asking questions than me. And I had to learn, what does this look like? What do they do? Why do they ask these kind of questions? Why did they ask that question and not this one? And wow, I never would’ve thought to ask that, but look at the result that that had.

(17:20):
That was really powerful. And so paying attention to other people who are actually good at it helped me to learn. I wouldn’t say that I’m great at it, but I’m better than I was. And so we’re learning as we go as well.

Janel Greig (17:34):
Yes, yes. That’s super helpful. Thank you.

Dr. Matt Jones (17:37):
So how do you think, you mentioned there’s a lot of information out there, and there is. I mean, just the amount of information that we have access to on a phone is just still overwhelming. But how do you as a parent or encourage us as parents to help students, kids evaluate messages they’re constantly receiving? What are some key tools to help them say, “All right, this is true,” or, “This is not,” or, “This part is true, but it’s a little off. It’s more of a half-truth.” And how do we do that without them being scared to ask questions or we become overly critical of their question?

Kathy Gibbens (18:19):
Yep. No, great question. So for me, there’s a couple steps in it. So one, this is why I started the podcast, is to just teach the fallacies. Because what I learned is that when you introduce kids and you give them names, you introduce kids to the fallacies, and then season two has been all about the cognitive biases. And you just introduce them and you say, “Here’s this thing,” and it has a name. Okay.

Our brains, especially kids’ brains, are all about trying to make sense of the world and compartmentalizing. Now you’ve given it a little peg on the shelf. Okay, there’s a peg for this. When I see this, ah, I know what it is. I can hang it on the peg. When I see this, I can hang it on this peg. And you’ve given them those pegs with which now when they see information, they can do something with it.

(19:05):
And man, middle school is such a. Not that we can’t learn it, because obviously I learned it in my forties and fifties. So not that we can’t learn it any other times, but I’m talking to parents here. So you’ve got a really great window of opportunity with these kids as they’re coming into middle school and high school to teach them how to think.

So number one, just give them the names. Give them the names of these because once they start to have names, they will recognize it. Then the next thing that you’re going to do is you are going to practice with them, teaching them how to think about the things that they’re seeing. And the way that you do this is, again, just with the stuff that’s around you.

So what I started doing with my daughter as I’m scrolling on social media, because she obviously didn’t have it at that time, she was young, is when I came across something that was age appropriate to show her, I would show it to her and I’d just say, “What do you think?”

(19:57):
And I would make her think about it. And I’d say, “Okay, why is that an emotional appeal? Why is that an appeal to guilt? What do you think they were trying to do with that?” And I started just asking her, and it sounds like it’s a big deal. It might take two minutes, maybe three-minute conversation.

You’re driving down the road and there’s a bumper sticker. Now, beware, teaching your kids how to read bumper stickers because they’re not all appropriate, but they’re seeing it anyways, right? So you may as well have the conversation. Or billboards on the side of the road. “Hey, what’s that? Look at that. “And then you have this little mini conversation. Again, people always think it has to be this big, like I’m going to teach them all this stuff. You are teaching them as you have these little conversations all throughout your day.

(20:39):
So use what’s going on around you in life. Use the conversation you just had with grandma. Hey, did you hear when grandma said this? Okay, we love grandma and she’s wonderful, but it’s a really good example of this. And what do you think? Why do you think that? To me is the best way to do it because now you’re reinforcing it. You’re using what’s happening already around you in life.

And it’s teaching them that, oh, I’m going to see this on a regular basis. I’m going to hear this and I can just recognize it and go on with my day. I don’t have to make this a big deal and put the person down. I just can recognize it and think about what’s true. You don’t have to ask 500 questions. Nobody wants to be interrogated, but just give them a couple questions because that teaches them, I can think about this just a little bit more and kind of recognize what’s happening here.

Janel Greig (21:28):
That’s awesome.

Dr. Matt Jones (21:31):
That’s a great point. And so we’re actually, this conversation is going so well that we’re going to decide to split this up into two conversations. Is that all right with you, Kathy?

Kathy Gibbens (21:41):
Totally all right. And by going really well, you mean kind of long, but yes.

Dr. Matt Jones (21:44):
No. Well.

Kathy Gibbens (21:45):
Okay. Okay.

Dr. Matt Jones (21:46):
No, not yet. How about this? I’ll tell you if it gets long. Kathy, how’s that? Okay. Okay, perfect. All right, good. No, but if there’s one thing to take away from our show today thus far, and so we’ll have more to take away from the second part is the importance of asking questions. That helps our children and even us develop our skills not only to ask them, but also have responses.

And just because a question’s asked doesn’t mean you have to give an answer. Maybe it may be an opportunity for you to press in more to not only deepen your critical thinking skills, but also your child. Our goal isn’t just to raise kids to give right answers, it’s to raise kids to know how to think. And it is such an important skill. So we want them to ask questions, to continue to seek truth and live in the light of the truth through the power of the Holy Spirit.

(22:32):
So Kathy, we thank you for joining us today, and we look forward to part two of this conversation where you will help us to continue to filter it through a brain cell. And I’m just glad that I did not lose any during our first half of this podcast today. So we look forward to part two with you, Kathy, and thank you for your time.