Last Updated on September 11, 2025 by Ginny Kochis

As a Catholic parent, how do you teach neurodivergent kids to sort through fake news and media bias?  With a little old-fashioned critical thinking! Here’s a short course on evaluating an argument, complete with a handy printable.

Writers and journalists are human, and humans have opinions. If the world were perfect, we’d have opinion pieces clearly marked in the opinion section, and straightforward, factual news printed everywhere else.  

But the world isn’t perfect, and even the most trusted news sources can lead toward a particular bias. Add the scourge of misinformation (also called fake news), the growing prevalence of AI deep fakes, and the cultural propensity to find and share headlines on social media, and we have quite the recipe for disaster:

An instantaneous, immediate gratification frenzy passed off as intellectual discourse.

Why is this a problem? Sixty percent of Facebook users don’t click to read the links they share. Inflammatory, gut-punch headlines designed to hook at first glance become the story, forming and, in some cases, adding veracity to an individual’s attitudes and worldview. The explanation, the review, the nuance of discourse gets buried under the instant gratification of being proved right. Snap judgments abound. Conversations about the topic devolve into personal attacks and name-calling.

It’s easier to accept that which confirms our own bias than to think critically about the topic at length.

Fides et Ratio: A Catholic Guide to Critical Thinking

As Catholics, we know the Church has the fullness of the Truth. Christ is the Truth, and it is through him that we come to know the truth about ourselves and the world around us, not through sound bites or out-of-context quotations. Pope St. John Paul the Great tackled this reality in his encyclical, Fides et Ratio, a thoughtful, philosophical response to moral relativism and skepticism. While John Paul does not directly address media bias as a whole, he does focus on the human heart’s thirst for knowledge:

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves

Pope St. John Paul the Great, Fides et Ratio

That is, ultimately, what we are seeking. The fullness of truth about ourselves and the world. In that endeavor, then, we are called not only to explore and evaluate the information presented to us, but to teach our children to do the same.

For neurodivergent families, the challenge is two-fold.

Not only must we endeavor to teach critical thinking skills to our kids, who can tend toward rabbit-holes and hyperfocus, we must also address the issue of black and white thinking: a cognitive distortion in which our kids tend to see people, ideas, and situations in extremes. There is no nuance or middle ground, no tendency to evaluate all sides of an issue. On a personal level, this results in abnormally high and unrealistic expectations, primarily for oneself. On an interpersonal level, this can evoke strong, intensely emotional responses when ideas or attitudes are challenged. In some ways, it’s akin to the vitriolic non-conversations we see online. The knee-jerk response is to label opposition as bad, wrong, or hurtful, without seeking a neutral position from which to engage ideas.

Neurodivergent children are out-of-the-box thinkers, and as such, bear the potential for great things.

This is the main reason I beat the critical thinking drum so frequently: in a culture that promotes a manipulative descent into unprincipled, amoral conformity, we are not meant to go down with the ship. We are meant to stand apart, to employ the Truth of our faith and intellectual reason as a means to discernment and action. Without critical thinking skills, we are unable to evaluate the complexities and truth of an ideology or situation.

We cannot reach our brother if we are spitting in his face.

How to teach critical thinking skills

First, identify the argument by digging into the information you’ve encountered

• If the information is an opinion piece (located in an opinion section, publication, or labeled as such in the title), you’ll probably find it in the first few paragraphs (or, in the case of a video, in the first few minutes of tape).
• If the information is presented as straight news, you’ll have to find the argument based on what is implied. Look for
  • Tone: the author’s attitude toward his subject
  • Language: is the word choice positive or negative?
  • Details: are they presented in an encouraging or discouraging light?
  • Commentary: is the discussion biting, neutral, or supportive?

Then, consider the audience and the source

• To whom is this information directed?  How do I know?
• If print, in what publication does the piece appear? What do I know about this publication? If video, what studio/influencer/station created the content? What do I know about this creator?

Next, find the argument’s supporting details

• What information is included? Are there
  • Facts?
  • Anecdotes (brief stories)?
  • Statistics?
  • Expert opinion

Then, question those supporting details

• Do I agree? Why?
• Do I disagree?  Why?
• What have others said about this, and why?

And evaluate them

Look for rhetorical devices and fallacies. They will help you develop your own additional supports or identify flaws in the argument. Find examples of 

• Pathos, ethos, and logos
  • Pathos: an appeal to emotion meant to sway an audience.
  • Logos: an appeal to the audience’s sense of reason and logic
  • Ethos: an attempt to convey the author’s credibility and credentials
• Logical fallacies: misconceptions or flaws in reasoning that intend to hide or manipulate the truth

How do they build up or take away from the argument?

Finally, get a second opinion.

• What other sources have covered the issue?
• Are there different versions of the same situation? How do they differ? How are they the same?

And make your final assessment.

• What is your opinion on the issue?
• How would you improve the argument?
• Is the source authentic?
• Is the source biased?

The more we practice evaluating an argument, the more habitual it becomes.  We may not live in a perfect world, but we do have pretty decent brains.  Let’s use what God gave us and learn to read, think, and make decisions for ourselves, not according to what everybody else says, but according to what we discover on our own.

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