Children enter a world filled to the brim with bad ideas, prompting some adults to protect them by trying to curate which ideas they should get exposed to, being careful to avoid what they deem harmful. After all, what defense does an innocent child have against the dark arts of bad ideas? That question rests on one flawed assumption, omnipresent in our culture, itself one of those bad ideas that would have been worth curating away: that minds are like buckets that passively receive the information that is poured into them. Applied to children, the bucket is imagined to be fragile as well; hence they are in special need of protection from the onslaught of memetic acid rain. On this false view, the solution is to coerce, and alas this is the solution that the left and the right preach in different forms. They disagree about what constitutes a bad idea that children should be protected from, naturally, but they agree on the premise. I want to argue something different, based on the (wonderful) truth about people and children's minds that Popper taught us: they are searchlights, and if you let that light loose, it can expose all the cracks and contradictions inherent in bad ideas.
From the progressive side, there have been attempts to want to protect students from books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" because of the prevalence of racial slurs. The right want to ban children's books like "And Tango Makes Three" about two male penguins raising a chick for fear of promoting LGBTQ agendas. In keeping with the truth about minds, I won't worry one bit about bad ideas "entering our house". If I see a bad idea, I will want to investigate it together with my family, challenge what it says, and ask questions about it, one of the most important being "What problem does it solve?"—a question that can put an end to pointless sophistry in one fell swoop. The thing to cultivate is open and fearless criticism, fearless of authority. It's not "Who are you to say this?" It's "Tell me more about what you think." Criticism is not only welcome; it is awesome. I have a lot of strong convictions about liberalism, individualism, freedom and progress, and I don't worry one iota, as they say, whether my daughter disagrees with me about them. On the contrary, what a gift to have this human being, whom I had a part in creating, calling me out on my faulty arguments, inviting me in to participate in her enquiry about how the world works. I will call out her faulty arguments as well; no one is exempt: neither I nor she, nor the teacher, the expert, nor the priest. Failure would be if she didn't want to share her thoughts with me for fear of being ridiculed or shamed for her ideas. That means treating everybody in our house with respect, showing them that every one of their thoughts is welcome and has dignity. Most of all, have fun with ideas, laugh at the nonsense, come up with crazy examples: "What if a whale could join this conversation about whaling? How would it even enter the door?" This is the ideal I aim for, and I will likely fail from time to time. But the presence of bad ideas will never be a failure, only how I deal with them.
Together, a family can choose to have fun with bad ideas instead of fearing them.