Call me cruel, but I could have been more like a crutch than a… well, whatever the opposite of a crutch is…

The first thing, looking back on that “nearly a year” of fatherhood is the challenges. By these I refer to not only the challenges for me, but the challenges for The Girl herself.

Don’t get me wrong. Teaching kids to share is important.

I think the skills that form the foundations of critical thought are not so much about being skeptical, scientific, or digging into research as they are about opening the experiences of the world to that kind of rational thought and that foster independence, promote integrity, and unleash imagination.

I tend to believe — and more than ever as I work on this blog — that you cannot raise critical thinkers without being somewhat a skeptical parent, and you cannot be a skeptical parent and easily avoid raising critical thinkers.

The question that burned in the back of my mind was this: what are the the key skills that define moral, skeptical, critical thought and how would one go about imparting those skills to a child?