Colman Noctor: Looking beyond our children's woke statements and teaching critical thinking

Children need to be taught to be critical friends of technology

While children may appear impressively adept at navigating the infrastructure of the online world, their ability to distinguish informed evidence from opinionated commentary needs to be supported

‘Don’t fat shame the puppy” wasn’t a sentence I expected to hear from my eight-year-old son. I was taken aback by his awareness of the phrase but more so by the seriousness of his tone. The comment came off the back of me directing his older sister to stop feeding the puppy from the table as he could potentially put on weight from the extra food.

The discussion evolved with me attempting to explain how I had not called the puppy ‘fat’... instead I had merely warned about the potential of the puppy becoming overweight if we continued to give him top-up food from the table.