Below  are two articles that I was sent a while back, and that I have been meaning to put up on the mentalfitnessnow blog for a while as I think they have a lot of important things for us to think about. Explicitly they are looking at the ways in which we can nurture and encourage creativity in our children as they grow up (as opposed to stamping it out with over schooling and commercial toys). But implicitly I think the articles give us a lot of useful information with regard to how we can begin to resurrect our own creative selves as adults.

For example, below it says that overcontrol is a good way to kill creativity in the life of our child. How often do we find ourselves trying to over control and manage our own life, to the detriment of our mental wellness and creativity?

Similarly the second article mentions that commercial toys that leave no room for children to imagine what the object could be are a creativity killer. How much of the time do you as an adult simply surround ourselves with readymade products that leave us no room to imagine or to problem solve in an empowering way?

Anyway, the articles speak for themselves, so enjoy, I just think that we as adults can get positive reflections on ourselves if we read them in the light of our own lifestyle and way of thinking, as well as our children’s.

Creativity In Children

By D. Goleman & P. Kaufman

March 1, 1992

Creativity takes root in childhood. For the child, life is a creative adventure. The most basic explorations of a child’s world are creative exercises in problem-solving. They begin a lifelong process of inventing themselves. In this sense, every child reinvents language, walking, love.

“The kernel of creativity,” says psychologist Teresa Amabile, “is there in the infant: the desire and drive to explore, to find out about things, to try things out, to experiment with different ways of handling things and looking at things. As they grow older, children begin to create entire universes of reality in their play.”

Our experience of creativity in childhood shapes much of what we do in adulthood, from work to family life. But if creativity is a child’s natural state, what happens on the way to adulthood? The psychological pressures that inhibit a child’s creativity occur early in life. Parents can encourage or suppress the creativity of their children in the home environment and by what they demand of schools. Most children in preschool, kindergarten—even in the first grade—love being in school. They are excited about exploring and learning. But by the time they are in the third or fourth grade, many don’t like school, let alone have any sense of pleasure in their own creativity.

 Amabile’s research has identified the main creativity killers:

Surveillance: Hovering over kids, making them feel that they’re constantly being watched while they’re working.

Evaluation: Making kids worry about how others judge what they are doing. Kids should be concerned primarily with how satisfied they—and not others—are with their accomplishments.

Competition: Putting kids in a win/lose situation, where only one person can come out on top. A child should be allowed to progress at his own rate.

Overcontrol: Telling kids exactly how to do things. This leaves children feeling that any exploration is a waste of time.

Pressure: Establishing grandiose expectations for a child’s performance. Training regimes can easily backfire and end up instilling an aversion for the subject being taught.

One of the greatest creativity killers, however, is more subtle and so deeply rooted in our culture that it is hardly noticed. It has to do with time. Children more naturally than adults enter that ultimate state of creativity called flow. In flow, time does not matter; there is only the timeless moment at hand. It is a state that is more comfortable for children than adults, who are more conscious of the passage of time.

“One ingredient of creativity is open-ended time,” says Ann Lewan, a director of the Capital Children’s Museum in Washington, D.C. “Children have the capacity to get lost in whatever they’re doing in a way that is much harder for an adult. They need the opportunity to follow their natural inclinations, their own particular talents, to go wherever their proclivities lead them.”

Unfortunately, children are interrupted, torn out of their deep concentration. Their desire to work through something is frustrated. “We live in such a hurry-up way, so again and again children are stopped in the middle of things they love to do,” Lewan says. “They are scheduled. That, more than anything, will stifle creativity.”

Creativity flourishes when things are done for enjoyment. When children learn a creative form, preserving the joy matters as much—if not more—than “getting it right.” What matters is the pleasure, not perfection.

A stimulating physical environment is part of the equation. So are specific attitudes that also foster the creative spirit in the young. In creative families, there is a different feeling in the air; there’s more breathing space. The parents of creative children give them what may seem to be a surprising amount of freedom.

That is not an easy lesson for many parents. “The main thing I’ve learned from my own daughter, Kristene,” says Amabile, “is not to overcontrol, and how important it is as a parent to give her freedom and space. When she was really little, I’d see her playing with a new toy or a game. And she’d be trying to put something together or do something in a way that I knew was wrong; it wasn’t the way the game was ‘supposed’ to be put together. And I’d rush in and say, ‘No, no, honey, let me show you how to do it.’ And as soon as I did that, she’d lose interest.

“I realized that she was discovering new ways of playing with games and toys. Maybe these weren’t the way they were intended to be played with. But she was being creative.”

When parents are supportive of their children’s creativity, they will discover what most psychologists are now confirming: Most children have a natural talent for a particular activity. By letting a child explore a range of activities, budding talents are more likely to emerge, The essentials of children’s creativity—especially the importance of finding what they’re excited about, mastering the skills necessary to realize that intelligence, and collaborating with others—are prerequisites for creativity in adult life. Perhaps nowhere is this more crucial than in the work we do.

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Everyday Art

By Christine Carter

Dec 2009

A lot of parents believe that their children are either born with artistic talent or they’re not. But research suggests that artistic creativity, along with other kinds of creativity, is more of a skill than an inborn talent, and it’s a skill parents can help their kids develop.

Many researchers believe we have fundamentally changed the experience of childhood in a way that impairs creative development. Toy and entertainment companies provide an endless stream of prefab characters, images, props, and plotlines that allow kids to put their imaginations to rest. Children no longer need to pretend a stick is a sword in a game or story they’ve imagined; they can play Star Wars with a readymade light-saber, in costumes designed for the specific role they’re playing. 

But researchers have also identified steps we can take to help kids tap into their own creative potential. Drawing on that research, here are some ideas for fostering creativity in kids.

Provide the resources for creative expression. The key resource here is time. Kids need a lot of time for unstructured, child-directed, imaginative play—unencumbered by adult direction, and independent of a lot of commercial stuff. Research by Kathy Hirsch-Pasek of Temple University, among others, has found that children attending academic preschools show no advantage in reading or math achievement over kids who go to play-based preschools. But they do tend to have higher levels of test anxiety, exhibit less creativity, and have more negative attitudes toward school.

Look for resources that help kids create but that don’t tell them what to create. I’ve been amazed by some of the things my kids do with art supplies, cheap cameras, old costumes, and building materials.

Make your home a Petri dish for creativity. At dinnertime, for example, brainstorm activities for the upcoming weekend, encouraging the kids to come up with things they’ve never done before. Resist pointing out which ideas aren’t possible, or deciding which ideas are best. The focus of creative activities should be on the process—generating (vs. evaluating) new ideas.

Another way to nurture a creative atmosphere at home is to encourage kids to take risks, make mistakes, and fail. Yes, fail: In her book Mindset, Stanford researcher Carol Dweck shows that kids who are afraid of failure and judgment will curb their own creative thought. Share the mistakes you’ve made recently, so they get the idea that it’s okay to flub up.

Allow kids the freedom and autonomy to explore their ideas. For me, this means not always being so bossy! External constraints—making kids color within the lines, so to speak—can reduce creativity in thinking. In one study, when researchers first showed kids how to make a plane or truck with Legos, kids showed less creativity in their own building than when they were just let loose to make whatever they wanted with the same Lego set.

Encourage kids to read for pleasure and participate in the arts, rather than watch TV. Studies by children’s health researcher Dimitri Christakis have found that TV viewing before the age of three can harm kids’ language development and attention spans later in life. Studies by Dutch researcher T.H. van der Voort suggest that watching TV might reduce kids’ creative imagination, and violent TV shows are associated with a decrease in kids’ fantasy play and an increase in aggressiveness. Less screen time means more time for creative activities, like rehearsing a play, learning to draw, or reading every book by a favorite author

Resist the temptation to reward kids for their creativity. A study led by child development researcher Melissa Groves has found that incentives interfere with the creative process, reducing the flexibility of children’s thinking.

Instead of trying to motivate kids with rewards and incentives, we parents sometimes need to back off so that kids can work on the creative activities that they’re intrinsically motivated to do. Instead of rewarding a child for practicing the piano, for example, we can encourage her to do something she enjoys more—maybe draw at the kitchen table or dance around the living room.

Try to stop caring what your kids achieve. I think this is one of the greatest challenges we parents face in today’s ultra-competitive world. But Dweck’s research is very clear that kids gain confidence from an emphasis on process rather than product. This can be hard advice to follow when our kids come home from school with just the end product of an art project. But whether they’re working at home or at school, we can emphasize the creative process by asking questions: Are you finished? What did you like about that activity? Did you have fun?

Perhaps most importantly, research shows that fostering creativity in our kids will help them with more than art: Creativity is essential to science, math, and even emotional intelligence. Creative people are more flexible and more successful problem solvers, making them better poised to take advantage of new opportunities. So when we nurture the artistic lives of our children, we give them the tools they need to thrive in our rapidly changing world.

Christine Carter, Ph.D., is the executive director of the Greater Good Science Center.

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“Children are by nature most inclined towards play, so a thirst for knowledge will have to be awakened in children through the medium of play – children should be educated through play methods. Children are also by nature inclined to listen to fantasies and stories. Through stories children can easily be taught the history and geography of various countries, and they may also be taught the initial lessons of how to practise universalism in their lives. Children love play and stories almost equally, so in their case the two should be equally utilized.” ~ Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar