| | | | Protecting the Creative Spark in Children |
By Seth Mullins
For many children, unfortunately, the fires of creativity begin to ebb at a young age. Much of the blame can be laid on our educational systems and their heavy emphasis on right or wrong answers and correct or incorrect approaches to solving problems. Children learn to approach questions not from a place of infinite possibilities but rather from a concern to “get it right”. They learn that they will move through life with much less friction if they do what is expected of them, and begin to suspect that thinking outside of the box will only get them in trouble.
That’s because they typically receive approval when they’ve memorized certain facts or procedures and succeeded in reflecting them back in the same way that they were first presented. We can keep creativity alive in our children, then, by giving them room to explore and putting more emphasis upon their process (“I like the way you used your imagination there”) rather than the end result (“Good job! You got the answer right!”).
One approach is to get kids involved in unusual projects that there’s no single right or wrong way of doing. If they’re involved with painting their feet with watercolors they’re apt to be less concerned about whether or not they’re doing it according to an adult’s expectations than if they’re struggling through a math problem. We can reinforce this spirit of free play by refraining from drawing so much attention to the picture they ended up with and instead comment on the way they did it (the colors they experimented with, or the way they stroked with the brush). Kids are, by nature, very curious, and just a gentle nudge from us is usually enough to send them off on another round of joyful explorations.
We can also encourage their creativity by modeling it ourselves. Many educators have observed, for example, how the children who learn to read well early on are oftentimes the ones who saw their parents reading and/or lived in a home environment where books were plentiful. These children came to view reading as a pleasurable activity and responded to it as such. Thus, their education in this area came with little effort. The same principle can apply to virtually any activity, whether it’s finger-painting, gardening, dancing, singing or writing.
Children learn by imitation, by emulating the action they perceive happening in the world around them. If we provide them with an environment that is spontaneous (but with healthy built-in structure) then they will be more apt to trust the movements within their own imaginations, too. What’s more, they won’t be as likely to judge whether or not the products of their imaginations are right or wrong.
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