How To Encourage An Open Mind In Children
Fostering an open mind in children is important for their future personal and social development because people with an open mind are positive people with a desire to constantly learn from life and from others.
What are people who have an open mind like?
People who have an open mind are willing to learn from everything and everyone. They are predisposed and receptive people to meet the other and try to integrate different points of view and opinions. As a result, they are flexible, accept challenges and contradictions, and are willing to challenge their own ideas and beliefs.
A person with an open mind is likely to be someone who has traveled, lived through many experiences, and interacted with many people. Or perhaps it is a more lonely and introverted person, but who has been able to cultivate his inner world. In both cases they are people with great empathy capable of listening to others actively.
In addition, an open mind allows you to be better able to interpret reality in an objective way. That is to say, consider different perspectives, contexts and circumstances before giving an opinion or judging someone, understanding that each person is unique and that their way of thinking and seeing life is linked to their own particular existential experience.
Thus, people with an open mind are almost always willing to learn at all times, both studying formally and institutionally, as well as informally, from the same practice and from everyday life.
In short, having an open mind helps people not to set limits in order to achieve their goals and to be able to develop their full potential.
Why is it important to encourage an open mind in children?
Open-minded parents are probably clear about the importance of fostering an open mind in their children and they do so every day in their education. However, there are many other parents who have a harder time understanding what it means or what it means to encourage an open mind in their children. There are even parents who sometimes confuse an open mind with a certain debauchery.
But the opposite; the vast majority of open-minded people are capable of understanding and respecting limits, always within a legal framework. Because they understand that in the world there is a diversity of cultures and customs and that, therefore, there are many truths and ways of life and that the freedoms of one end when those of others begin.
Thus, it is important that parents use strategies and promote behaviors so that their children develop an open mind. This will help children to understand that people are different and that in the difference, in the contradictions and in the complexity of life there is the opportunity to learn, to be smarter and better people.
Strategies to encourage an open mind in children
- Taking them out of school to do different activities, be it sports, learning an instrument or attending an academy to learn languages.
- Encourage them to interact and learn from other children different from themselves, with other life circumstances, nationalities, cultures and customs.
- Teach them that there are no absolute truths and educate them by being tolerant and respectful of the beliefs and ideas of others.
- Make them understand that diverse opinions make them think and help them to be smarter.
- Explain that the traditions and popular festivals themselves are not the only ones, that there are as many as there are people in the world.
- Motivate them to learn and to know the unknown. Motivate them, as they grow, to travel, study and train in what they like and in various topics.
- Promote the habit of reading about different genres and various topics.
- Educate them not to despise or judge anyone for any reason, nor allow them to feel better or superior than anyone else.
- Propose them to attend or participate in associations or NGOs organized around the specific needs of various groups of people.
Surely there are as many strategies to help children have an open mind. But, surely, to encourage an open mind in children, it is essential to awaken in them the curiosity to always learn.
Likewise, it is essential to convey to them the need, as a condition for achieving what they set out to do, to know beyond their own reality.
