And so this is the gift of reading that we can restore to our families, even with like 10 or 15 minutes a day, put phones away.

They need to be, by the way, out of the room, just like, you know, if you're on a diet, you don't leave the potato chips on the counter. You put them in the cupboard with the door closed.

You've got to keep that phone away.

And then read together and just sit and allow for reading to be something that we sink into. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes before your mind stops the chatter of, I wonder if somebody liked my post yet.

You're listening to she with Jordan Lee Dooley, a personal development podcast for the everyday woman, come invited, leave, ignite it. Here's your host, Jordan Lee Dooley.

Hey, Julie, welcome to she.

So glad to be here, Jordan. Thanks.

Yes. So happy to have you. I'm looking forward to this conversation. I think this is a really interesting one and different from what we've talked about in the show before, but I think it's really good. So before we dig into all of the different questions I have for you, I would love if you can start off by sharing a little bit of your background and what led you to write your book raising critical thinkers.

Yeah, I would love to. So my work is in the education space, especially with homeschoolers back when I was raising my kids in the 1990s, I was a home educating mom of five, but I was also a freelance writer and author.

And during those years, the internet emerged out of nowhere, right out of nothing.

And I always joke that when the internet threw their doors open, the first people through were homeschoolers, we were isolated. There were very few of us.

We were all looking for support and advice from people who were in the trenches.

So we happily hopped online and we gathered around these couple of discussion boards that were almost like watering holes and start asking each other questions like paper cloth diapers to use oxyclean.

And we even bridged into things like politics and theology. We were a very homogeneous group of people, you know, stay home moms, probably mostly the same race, mostly the same religion, mostly similar politics.

But what stunned me was how many arguments we got into like instantly people would be so harsh with each other about paper versus cloth diapers or cesarean section versus home birth.

And I remember thinking, you know, if I ran into these women at a park day, this never happened. Why did we go from park day civility to internet insidility?

Like in a minute, and we're talking all the way back, right? We're talking all the way back to 1995, 96, 97. And so part of what animated me back in that day was how do we form our thoughts and why do we think we're right?

Why do we assume that when we come into the conversation, our job is to persuade not to listen or be curious. And of course some of that happened too. I mean, much of my most meaningful growth as an adult happened because of what we're almost internet blood bats.

Yeah, like digging deep, trying to justify your position and understand how you think better and then you're exposed to other thoughts. So that was the beginning of my curiosity around thinking and really it's been 25 years and includes grad school writing some books working in my company where we teach writing to students and really trying to understand how do people form their thoughts and why are they so attached to them?

So interesting. I love how you created that not created, but shared that differentiation between if we were all at the park, this wouldn't really happen. And then all of a sudden the internet came on and we had this like different challenge that we hadn't really faced in this to the same probably degree of intensity. I'm sure people still disagreed or had their opinions.

But like you said the internet blood bat that kind of suit and then this almost I guess expectation that our job is to persuade and to be right when in reality there's so much more to it. So that's really fascinating to me and thank you for sharing that because that really gives a lot of context to this conversation and I think context to your background, which is super helpful leading into this conversation, which I think leads me to the first question, which would be what does it mean to be a critical thinker.

I think we hear this like phrase and it's almost like a buzzword in some ways like we hear it a lot, but like what does that actually mean? I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

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