This article originally appeared at NationalGeographic.com.

Last summer, 7-year-old Zusha came home from day camp frightened by a scary story. According to his mother, Yael Shy, he said: “My friend George told me about a milkshake that you drink, and then somebody comes and murders you. There’s videos of it, and it’s real, and the counselors know about it too!”

Shy had to do a bit of Googling to realize that Zusha’s story originated from a TikTok trend. People were filming themselves drinking Grimace-branded McDonald’s milkshakes, and then pretending to be killed, with the lurid purple liquid standing in as “blood.” It was all intended in good fun, but not for Zusha. He was crying from anxiety and couldn’t sleep.

Faced with a terrified little boy, Shy turned to the Internet. “I put into my phone ‘Are the Grimace Murders real?’” she says. “And thankfully the first thing that comes up is, ‘No, this is not real, it's a hoax.’ And I showed it to him.” He understood and then calmed down.

But it was a hard lesson to realize that her son could be exposed to online rumors through a friend, even if she doesn’t let him use the internet unsupervised at home.

Telling facts from fiction is a crucial skill. In the age of AI hallucinations, hoaxes, deceptive marketing, and record-low public trust in science and other institutions, it’s more important than ever to raise kids who can sift through evidence, identify reliable sources, and think for themselves.

The good news is that there are lots of researchers out there testing interventions that can help parents encourage critical thinking — for both kids as young as three to pre-teens and adolescents. Here are some of their insights.

PARENTS SHOULD BE OPEN TO QUESTIONS – EVEN UNCOMFORTABLE ONES
According to Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, specializing in adolescent development, kids start to develop critical thinking skills around age three, right around when they begin asking “why” questions.

“I think parents get frustrated with always having to explain things,” he says. “But it's important that they take the time, when they can, to answer those questions, because you don't want a child to think that it's bad or wrong to ask.”

This applies when you’re chatting about questions like “why is the sky blue?” but it’s even more important when kids are questioning your rules or limits, Steinberg says.

Authoritarian parents, who are excessively firm without being especially warm, tend to have kids who are more anxious, depressed, and dependent. Steinberg thinks this style of parenting can undermine critical thinking as well. “When parents say things to their kids like, ‘Don't talk back to me.’ ‘Do it because I said so,’ ‘You're not old enough to understand this,’ that discourages kids from asking questions and challenging things that they don't think makes sense.”

Instead, he says, parents should role model critical thinking and improve their bond with their children by listening and finding opportunities to say, “You’re right! I never thought about it that way!”

As parents, we don’t always know the answers. Or we may hear a question we’re too embarrassed to answer, on a taboo topic, like sex or drugs. In those moments, experts say, it’s extra important to not be dismissive and shut the conversation down.

“It’s spaces where [a child] doesn't have much pre-existing knowledge that misinformation can really flourish,” says Lisa Fazio. She’s in the Department of Psychology at Vanderbilt University, where she researches the psychological drivers of belief in misinformation.

The solution, says Fazio: “Fill the void.” Respond to tricky queries in an age-appropriate way, with bite-sized pieces of information. Answer just the question that they’re asking and keep it simple.

For example: Thanks to a newspaper headline at the breakfast table my 8-year-old recently asked me: “What’s an abortion?”

I answered: “It’s when someone wants to end a pregnancy. They can have an operation to do that.” That satisfied her curiosity for the moment and left the door open to further conversations.

If you are at a loss for words, point your kids to reputable sources that you can look at together. Amaze.org has age-appropriate puberty and sex education videos. Stanford’s REACH Lab has accessible resources that give facts about drugs and alcohol.

SCROLL ALONGSIDE YOUR CHILD
Fazio says there’s a misconception that because young people are “digital natives,” they’re automatically good at discerning the truth in what they see online. Not true, she says.

“One thing that could be useful is just sitting down with your kid and watching what they do online,” she says. Then, prompt your kids with questions to start thinking critically about the sources that appear in their feeds.

"Talk about, 'who are these people?” she says.“What motivations do they have? Are they trying to sell you something? Are they trying to make you laugh? Why are they posting what they're posting?"

These questions force kids to slow down and actively engage in the information, instead of just taking it in passively.

FOR OLDER KIDS, TRY RESEARCH-BACKED LESSON PLANS – OR EVEN A GAME
As kids get older, and grow more independent, they can learn to do their own fact checking, without the need to grab their parent every time they encounter something confusing or suspicious.

Mike Caulfield studies the spread of online rumors and misinformation at the University of Washington. In his work, he developed what he called the SIFT methodology to improve fact-checking strategies in students as young as 5th grade.

SIFT stands for: Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims to the original context.

But how do you know when to Stop in the first place? Caulfield tells students to stop when they hear, see, or read something that triggers a big feeling. “If something makes you angry, if it seems surprising or shocking, or on the other hand, if you see something that makes you feel very self-righteous,” he says. "Those are the things you want to check.”

Teaching the basics of the scientific method is another research-proven strategy for helping students think critically. Heather Munthe-Kaas is a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. Her team has developed “Be Smart About Your Health,” which are lesson plans designed to get students thinking critically about health claims.

These lessons teach kids explicitly to dissect and focus on the evidence for a claim. For example, students are asked to judge the value of an anecdote, like, “My friend ate oranges and recovered from the flu,” or “my grandmother says it’s traditional to use a steam bath when you have a cold.”

Students are taught if a claim is purely based on personal experience “that’s not very good” evidence Munthe-Kaas says.

By age 10 or 11, kids can learn to evaluate evidence the way scientists do. They can grasp that a strong health claim needs to be backed by an experiment: a fair comparison between two groups of a decent size, where the only difference is made by the intervention you’re looking at.

John Cook at Monash University in Australia is an expert in climate misinformation and debunking. He created the “Cranky Uncle” online game, which helps students spot common misinformation techniques. You can download it and play it with your kids for free.

In the game, students learn to spot the strategies that a balding, mustachioed “Cranky Uncle” character uses to deny science. Those tactics include fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry picking, and conspiracy theories. For example, the uncle cites a computer scientist’s opinion on vaccines as an example of “fake expert,” because while they may be a scientist, their specialty is not health.

Cook says his logic-based approach can be easily generalized to spot misinformation in different fields, which can make kids feel empowered. “People don’t like being misled,” he says. Which can motivate kids to take a moment and “override their gut instincts,” and critically assess a claim.

UNDERSTAND THE EMOTIONAL DRIVERS BEHIND MISINFORMATION BELIEFS
Fazio’s research shows that people tend to fall into conspiracy theories because they satisfy needs for belonging and certainty in a scary, confusing world.

When we see destructive extreme weather, or yet another school shooting, it can be disturbing, isolating, and hard to make sense of. Reputable experts can’t tell us exactly when or where the next big fire or flood is coming, say, but conspiracy theorists are out there convincing people that it’s all a plot or it’s all fake.

Fazio hypothesizes that adolescence can be a danger zone because it’s a time when people really crave acceptance. “A lot of these conspiracy communities online can be tight-knit," she says. "It gives you a sense of superiority. You know something that other people don't. You're in this secret group of people who understand the world like you.”

Her group is embarking on a study of teenagers, measuring factors like their need for in-group acceptance, their anxiety, depression, tolerance for uncertainty, and how all this relates to their level of conspiracy belief. If they can establish a correlation, it will help them develop interventions that address the emotional reasons young people fall into conspiratorial thinking, not just the cognitive gaps.

In the meantime, as parents we can do a lot to help our kids feel a sense of belonging within the family, Fazio says. And we can encourage socializing with healthy peer groups offline as well, which could make it less likely that they fall down conspiracy rabbit holes.

This article by Anya Kamenetz, along related coverage and additional stories, appear at NationalGeographic.com.

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