The floor of Dina Gjertsen's living room is carpeted with taped-together paper bags.
It's a semipermanent installation. Her 9-year-old son, Townes, has positioned his figurines on it as part of a strategy game he's cooking up. Meanwhile, in his bedroom, he has erected a hybrid of furniture and Legos that he calls The Temple.
"It helps that I'm not the most obsessive housekeeper," Gjertsen says. "I'm happy to walk around it all because the things he comes up with are so uniquely weird."
Where others might see a mess, Gjertsen sees creativity. As co-director at Parts and Crafts, a "hackerspace" in Somerville, Mass., she helps lots of children exercise their imaginations. The workshop is filled with everything from sewing machines and hot-glue guns to bins of golf balls. With these at their disposal, children are free to create.
Like Gjertsen, most of us are eager to nurture our children's creativity. A recent FamilyFun survey found that 71 percent of readers consider raising creative children to be "very important."
However, there's increasing evidence that this skill is under threat. Children's scores on the Torrance tests, the standard measurement of creative thinking, have fallen 20 percent since 1990. Experts blame everything from standardized testing to electronic screen-time overload. Compounding the problem is that many parents don't feel able to help. Our survey found that fewer than half of readers consider themselves "very creative."
But truth is, none of that matters.
"It's a myth that creativity is something you're born with or that arrives as one brilliant aha!" says Keith Sawyer, a professor at the University of North Carolina's School of Education in Chapel Hill and author of Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity. "It's a way of thinking and acting that we can get better at."
Let that sink in. Creativity can grow. It isn't just genetically bestowed. And helping children tap into their imagination could just be the most important learning goal you can implement this year.
So let's look at what creativity is, how it develops and what you can do to foster it at home.
THE ROOTS OF CREATIVITY
There are a lifetime of fantastic reasons to make boosting your child's creativity a parenting goal.
"Decades-long follow-up studies of kids' test scores show that the measure of a child's creative thinking is the best predictor of his accomplishments as an adult," says Mark Runco, who is editor of Creativity Research Journal.
And those accomplishments extend into many fields -- not only the arts.
In fact, creativity is a key to success whether you're designing an earthquake-proof building or creating a new life-saving medicine. However, engaging in traditional creative pursuits does seem to help the brain fire on all cylinders. Nobel-winning scientists are 22 times more likely to perform as actors, dancers or magicians compared with scientists who don't have these interests, notes Adam Grant, author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.
One of the key factors in creativity is divergent thinking, which is the ability to generate many unique ideas, says Elena Hoicka, a professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield in England. And children can exhibit it in infancy.
With curiosity about the new-to-them world and with attention spans that flit all over, young minds are virtual idea factories. That's why toddlers can instantly unspool wild tales of dinosaurs driving a flying bus to the amusement park ... and then to the candy store ... and then.
"There's no question children are more creative than adults," Runco says. "They don't take things for granted. They are not worried about judgment or how things have always been done."
Indeed, one North Dakota State University study found that college students who were asked to imagine themselves as 7-year-olds tested higher on creativity tasks than those who didn't adopt the childlike mindset.
As children get older, they get better at a second key element of creativity: convergent thinking. This involves narrowing down all the wild brainstorms to select the best option, then working to develop it into something useful. Older children also begin developing the perseverance that allows their ideas to come to fruition, even in the face of frustration and setbacks.
This kind of "what if" thinking and endless noodling flourishes
when children have unstructured time to play and daydream. That's because creativity happens in fits and starts -- not in one fell swoop.
Gjertsen has observed just that in her many hours at the workstations at Parts and Crafts.
"Sometimes children want to do the same thing over and over," she says. "Or they want to start something but then just throw it away and try something else."
Wrong turns and mistakes are creativity in action -- it's the brain at work exploring all the crazy possibilities.
"After a few years in school, children can learn to be afraid of looking stupid, making a mistake, not getting an A," Sawyer says. This is exactly when parents need to step in and reframe the conversation.
"Failure is part of the process," he says. "You will take detours. You will hit dead ends."
READY, SET, CREATE!
The refreshing bottom line? Everyone is born with the capacity for creativity -- we just have to know how to unlock it. We asked parents to share how they encourage their children to harness the power of their imaginations.
• Trust the process
"Parents and children can get too focused on the final result," says Meri Cherry, owner of the Meri Cherry Art Studio in Los Angeles and mother of two. "You have to end up with a beautiful masterpiece or it's a failure. If you are drawing a house, it has to have four walls and a rectangle roof. How limiting is that? There are a million kinds of houses in the world. If you see beauty in the process instead, it's a lot more fun."
• Question everything
Spend any time with a preschooler, and you know that little children are expert at asking why. As we get older, we tend to stop this and instead cruise on autopilot. Helping your child preserve this sense of inquiry is crucial to a creative mindset, Sawyer says.
"You want to foster a different way of seeing the world, where you wonder and notice the puzzling things around you," he says. That's because creativity is about not accepting how things are. It's about wondering how things could be better.
Christy Saludares, who blogs at From Engineer to Stay at Home Mom, sees things to wonder about together all around.
"We might look at a toy, and I'll ask my son, 'How do you think the toy was made?' If he says it started out as a hunk of plastic, I'll ask, 'What do you think they did first? Cut it? Paint it?' My kindergartner was so interested, he sketched out what he imagined was the whole process."
• Make it funny
If you have a good sense of humor, you're already highly skilled at looking at things in alternate ways -- a hallmark of divergent thinking.
"Humor lets children practice thinking ... in a fun way," Hoicka says. "When they get a laugh from others, their creativity is instantly rewarded." Riddles and jokes can get children in the many-answers mode. So start a round of riddles during that next quiet carpool.
• Give them a starter
Children often find a blank page intimidating. So provide a little structure and step back.
That's what Matt Richtel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times and the author of the children's book The Runaway Booger, does for his children.
"I'll sit at the computer and type the first few words at the top of a few pages," he says. "I leave lots of room on each page for them to fill in the rest and then illustrate their 'book.'"
• Solicit their help with problems
The best creative ideas are not only new -- they're useful. So enlist your child's help. What kind of toy could we make for the dog so he doesn't get bored when we're gone? What can we do about the recycling that's always overflowing the kitchen bin?
Brainstorming ideas, then implementing one together, gives children hands-on problem-solving practice.
• Be a model
At Parts and Crafts, Gjertsen and her co-workers are often immersed in their projects alongside the children.
"I'm always making dollhouse furniture and miniature food," she says. "In the sewing area, an artist has been working on an elaborate quilt for weeks. The children pick up on our energy and enthusiasm, and it makes the space come alive. And if a kid sees an artist making something, he might want to try it too."
You can do the same thing at home. Sit down and sketch next to your child, or enthuse over your latest knitting or furniture-refinishing project.
"Let them watch you," Saludares says. "Talk about what you are doing. Find ways to share what you love. In my case, that's science. For others, it could be writing or cooking."
• Expose them to diverse viewpoints
"Seeing different viewpoints lets you look at the world in new ways," says KH Kim, a professor at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., who studies creativity in children.
That perspective can result in fresh insights by making you question your assumptions. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to go backpacking through Europe. Kim notes that even reading a book about a different culture can give children a new outlook.
"Ask them to put themselves in the character's shoes," she says.
Pretty soon you'll begin to see creativity worth sharing everywhere.
"You can go to a baseball game and discuss how it is creative. A pitcher might be throwing in a totally unexpected way," Runco adds.
• Leave gaps in their schedule
"Children need time in their day to engage in unstructured activities of their own choosing," Sawyer says.
The most enriching activity might not be another round of French lessons but contemplating a column of dust or messing around in a leaf pile. Children who spend more time in free-form activities like these are better able to set goals and take actions to meet them without prodding from adults, according to a 2014 study in the online journal Frontiers in Psychology.
This might mean you need to be stalwart in the face of those nails-on-the-chalkboard words, "I'm bored." (In our FamilyFun survey, only about half, or 56 percent, of you said you allow your child to be bored as a way to encourage creativity.)
Boredom encourages daydreaming, a state in which the mind wanders and allows you to look at things in new ways. In one 2014 study in the Creativity Research Journal, for example, subjects who were asked to read a telephone book out loud came up with more uses for disposable cups afterward -- a classic test of divergent thinking -- compared with subjects who had not suffered through this stultifying task. Think of occasional boredom as recess for your child's brain.
• Help them hang in there
Making something new or figuring out a problem takes stamina. Showing that you value their efforts helps children keep at it.
"Often, children think they are done with a piece of art in two seconds," Cherry says. "So I will ask them about the process. 'I notice you chose the blue marker. I wonder what you are going to choose next.' Or I'll say, 'I wonder what would happen if you added tissue paper?'"
Your interest encourages them to keep going -- and that's what builds the muscle of creativity.
• Support their passions
Kim notes that the big creative achievements in life -- a new concerto, a groundbreaking theory about how to fix global warming -- require a long apprenticeship in which you develop a depth of expertise from which to build. You need passion to fuel this persistence.
Sawyer agrees.
"A huge body of evidence suggests that sustained creativity comes from intrinsic motivation," he says. "It happens only when you get real pleasure out of doing something."
Expose your child to lots of pursuits -- ballet, computer programming and more -- to see if they find something that makes them catch fire. If they fall in love with the oboe or robotics, find ways to encourage their enthusiasm.
They just might discover a passion that will change their life.
Family on 09/27/2017