How to raise broad-minded children: have them talk less and listen more for best results, say experts

Our world is shrinking. Intercontinental travel is easy, children attend international schools that represent dozens of different nationalities, and the internet exposes us in an instant to lives and views vastly different from our own.

And yet the fact that we actively seek to engender diversity in our workplaces, for example, suggests that for the culture cocktail most of us experience, differentness still rankles with many.

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When our children are small, they rarely notice differences. Boys are boys, girls are girls, and everybody has a problem sharing their toys. It doesn’t go much beyond that. They don’t begin to register – or object to – differentness until they begin to grow up, and then any prejudices that they may develop against other people – for their colour, creed, culture, just differentness – is the result of somebody else’s influence: a friend, a sibling and, very often, a parent.

But the imperatives of steering children away from developing biased opinions, especially when based on the views of others, cannot be overstated, not just because broad-minded kids make for a better world, but because being broad minded will – the clue’s in the name – open up their own worlds and opportunities. They will adopt out-of-the-box thinking and court the views of others to develop their own ideas. Their worlds really will be big, wide ones.

Quratulain Zaidi, a clinical psychologist at MindnLife in Hong Kong, defines “open-minded” as a willingness to try new things or to hear and consider new ideas.

“An example of an open-minded person is one who listens to his or her opponent in a debate to see if the information makes sense or if he/she can change their mind,” Zaidi says.