Are You Strong Enough for Your Child to Question You?

Before the pandemic, I sat in a school principal's office. He told me, proudly, how he was teaching his students critical thinking. One week later, a student questioned his position during a public discussion. Politely, factually, thoughtfully.

He called the student into his office and warned him never to publicly question him again.

I heard about it. He remembered our conversation. He apologized to the student. But the moment stayed with me. And it reveals a pattern I now see everywhere: in schools, in corporations, in families. We demand critical thinking. But we fall apart when it's applied to us.

This used to be a pedagogical problem. Now it's becoming a societal and economic one.

A New Generation Every 90 Days

The world we're preparing our children for in the AI era reinvents itself faster than a school year lasts. In the AI industry, we talk about "generations." Not in decades. In months. New AI models now appear every few months. Each of these models changes which skills humans need and which they don't.

And the curriculum? It barely changes.

The education system wasn't built for this speed. Agustina Paglayan, a political scientist at UC San Diego, studied the historical origins of education systems worldwide. Her finding: mass education was introduced after social upheaval. In Prussia after peasant revolts. In Massachusetts after Shays' Rebellion. In Colombia after La Violencia. A central motive was not critical thinking. It was discipline and social stability (Paglayan, 2024).

That sounds like history. But Paglayan shows that most education systems today still focus more on instilling specific values than on cultivating the critical thinking skills essential for individual autonomy.

The Beach Ball Under Water

Picture a beach ball you're pushing underwater. As long as you have the strength, it stays down. The moment you get tired, distracted, or let go, it shoots up. Maybe into your face.

That's what happens to emotions under rigid rules.

Daniel Wegner showed this in his famous 1987 "White Bear" experiment: subjects who tried not to think about a white bear for five minutes thought about white bears significantly more often afterward than the control group (Wegner et al., 1987). Thought suppression creates a rebound effect. A meta-analysis by Wang, Hagger, and Chatzisarantis (2020) confirmed this effect across 31 studies: rebound effects occur regardless of cognitive load.

Now apply this to parenting. A child receives rigid rules: "You don't do that." "That's not how you behave." "Don't question this." The emotion behind the behavior is never addressed. It gets suppressed. And Wang, Tian, and Yang (2024) show in their Experiential Avoidance Process Model: this suppression ties up cognitive resources and impairs flexible self-regulation. The child doesn't learn to handle the emotion. It learns to hide it.

What happens when the child gets tired? When the pressure fades? The beach ball shoots up. Impulsive or covert behaviors. Emotion-driven decisions with little thought behind them. Not despite the rigid rules. Because of the rigid rules.

So why do we keep holding on to them?

Judgment and Assessment Are Not the Same Thing

Because our entire education system is built on assessment. Right or wrong. Pass or fail. And assessment has a psychological root that interests me as a physician. Assessment is born from the need for control. Control arises because you feel uncertain. When assessment happens without prior observation and reflection, it becomes an instrument of control.

Judgment is different. Judgment emerges when you first observe, then reflect, then evaluate. In Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), we work with the principle of a non-judgmental stance: observing without evaluating before acting. That's real judgment.

The institutional reward system favors assessability and reproduction. Right or wrong. Good or bad. Pass or fail. Standardized tests measure whether a child can reproduce the prescribed answer. They don't measure whether it can think.

Gross and Cassidy (2019) document the consequences: emotional suppression in children and adolescents leads to negative emotional, social, cognitive, and physiological outcomes. Guo, Jiao, and Wang (2024) show in a study of 1,078 adolescents: non-supportive parenting affects depression and anxiety primarily through the mechanism of expressive suppression.

The principal who called the student in was assessing. His behavior followed the pattern: control first, reflect later. His system had taught him to secure authority through control. Not through competence.

Five Competencies No Grading System Has Rewarded Yet

What do children need for a world that reinvents itself at this pace? Not the storage of facts. Raw information is available in seconds. What matters is the ability to structure and apply knowledge. Five competencies:

1. Flexible knowledge instead of rigid facts. The World Economic Forum estimates that 50% of workers need reskilling (Thornhill-Miller et al., 2023). The OECD PISA test measured creative thinking across 64 countries for the first time in 2022. Result: 25% of the variance in creative thinking cannot be explained by academic performance (Gelmez Burakgazi & Reiss, 2025). Good grades say little about creative thinking ability.

2. Critical thinking. Real critical thinking. Not "critical thinking as long as you agree with me." Critical thinking means understanding rules, examining their purpose, and questioning them when necessary. This requires teachers and parents who are strong enough to be questioned themselves.

3. Creativity and collaboration with AI. Singapore, the country with the highest PISA scores in creative thinking (score: 41 out of 60), has pursued a "Teach Less, Learn More" strategy for years (OECD, 2024). Less lecturing. More independent discovery. The opposite of the Prussian model.

4. Emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman coined the term 30 years ago. The interventions have evolved, but the core remains: empathy and self-regulation cannot be automated. Dogru (2022) shows in a meta-analysis of 78,159 participants: emotional intelligence correlates with job performance (rho=0.30) and reduces stress (rho=-0.43). In a world where AI handles facts and processes, emotional intelligence remains the last human core competency.

5. Failure as a learning field. Children need the experience of acting unreasonably to understand what reasonable looks like. Without the experience that a decision was bad, no understanding of what makes a decision good.

Every single one of these competencies is systematically obstructed by rigid rules and standardized testing.

Conformity Gets Rewarded, Independence Gets Punished

The school system rewards rule-following with good grades. This is not a side effect. This is the design. Paglayan (2024) states it directly: roughly a third of children worldwide cannot read a simple sentence after four years of schooling. But they've learned compliance and rule-following.

What does this mean for graduates? School systems reward reliability more than originality. The students who learned to question rules, and got lower grades for it, trained a different competency: the willingness to examine rules and, when justified, to override them. This is not an argument against good grades. It's an argument against a system that primarily awards good grades for conformity.

What I Wrote About AI Yesterday Applies to Our Children

In my article yesterday, I described why AI governance requires psychological competence, not just technical skills. Why rigid rule sets don't work for probabilistic systems. Why contextual steering is better than universal prohibitions.

Everything that applies to AI governance applies even more to our children.

AI systems steered by rigid rules develop workarounds. Children raised with rigid rules do the same. AI systems need contextual steering that understands the purpose of an action. Children need parenting that explains the meaning of a rule rather than enforcing blind obedience.

The difference: when an AI develops workarounds, you lose money. When your child develops workarounds, you lose access to them.

The Real Question

Those who can regulate themselves will regulate technology better. And those who regulate technology better act more reliably toward other people.

That's the competency no curriculum captures. No standardized test measures. No grading system rewards.

And it's the only competency that won't be outdated in 90 days.

If your goal is to raise a child to think critically, there's only one question: Are you strong enough for that child to question you?

If you hesitated, you probably already know where the real challenge lies.

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Sources with URLs:

1. Wegner, D.M., Schneider, D.J., Carter, S.R. & White, T.L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1), 5-13. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1987-33493-001

2. Wang, D.A., Hagger, M.S. & Chatzisarantis, N.L.D. (2020). Ironic effects of thought suppression: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(3), 778-793. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32286932/

3. Wang, Y., Tian, J. & Yang, Q. (2024). Experiential Avoidance Process Model: A Review of the Mechanism for the Generation and Maintenance of Avoidance Behavior. Psychiatry and Clinical Psychopharmacology, 34(2), 179-190. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11332439/

4. Gross, J.T. & Cassidy, J. (2019). Expressive suppression of negative emotions in children and adolescents: Theory, data, and a guide for future research. Developmental Psychology, 55(9), 1938-1950. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31464496/

5. Guo, X., Jiao, R. & Wang, J. (2024). Connections between Parental Emotion Socialization and Internalizing Problems in Adolescents: Examining the Mediating Role of Emotion Regulation Strategies. Behavioral Sciences, 14(8). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11351946/

6. Paglayan, A.S. (2024). Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education. UC San Diego / Cambridge University Press. https://today.ucsd.edu/story/mass-education-was-designed-to-quash-critical-thinking

7. Thornhill-Miller, B. et al. (2023). Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication, and Collaboration: Assessment, Certification, and Promotion of 21st Century Skills. Journal of Intelligence, 11(3), 54. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10054602/

8. Gelmez Burakgazi, S. & Reiss, M.J. (2025). Exploring creative thinking skills in PISA: an ecological perspective on high-performing countries. Frontiers in Psychology. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12285537/

9. OECD (2024). PISA 2022 Results Volume III: Creative Minds, Creative Schools. OECD Publishing. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-iii_765ee8c2-en.html

10. Dogru, C. (2022). A Meta-Analysis of the Relationships Between Emotional Intelligence and Employee Outcomes. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 611348. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9082413/