AS A SOCIETY, we think about creativity as something that naturally occurs in children and gets weeded out and strangled as they grow up. This is true to a certain extent: our children are primed and ready to think in nontraditional ways from a very young age.
When kids do better on creativity tests than adults, it makes sense from a neuroscience perspective. When adults name things with wheels, they might tap into a memory list of all the types of vehicles they can think of, and they kind of get stuck there. They may not remember the wheelchair, the rolling desk, or the Ferris wheel.
The principles of neuroplasticity apply to creativity: remember that the most frequently activated pathways are more likely to be activated again, and if we don’t use a pathway, we’ll lose it. And our kids are losing creativity. It’s been shown that until a certain point in the schooling system, children are open-minded and are likely to give unique responses to questions; however, due to the conformity promoted at schools and at home, many lose the ability to come up with inventive ideas. Overall analysis of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) Abstractness of Titles subtest scores shows a score decrease starting in 1998, indicating a decrease in the creativity and critical thinking processes of children.1 We’re losing creativity by what we reinforce as parents and as a society.
We can reinforce creativity in our kids with just a bit of practice. Take, for example, a study where subjects were asked to design a new tool. People formally trained in design showed differences in brain organization during the creativity task compared to people who were novice designers. This shows that design training resulted in brain reorganization, specifically causing more right prefrontal cortex activation (a brain area involved in creative program solving) in the design experts.2
You may be surprised to learn that creativity training courses have been using a cognitive approach for nearly half a century now. That is, they are trying to make people more creative by educating them about the creative thought process, emphasizing the four steps a person takes throughout the cognitive process (preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification). This type of metacognition, or thinking about your thinking, helps enhance creativity. But learning about neuroscience is even more effective. An 8-week creativity training program at business schools in Denmark and Canada that also taught students about the underlying neuroscience principles of creativity led to greater student creative gains than training courses without the neuroscience content, and especially increased fluency in divergent thinking.3
We can do this as parents too. Some children will always be naturally more creative than others, but creativity can also be trained in a number of proven ways. To make your house a creativity haven, work toward doing the following throughout your life: be open, share knowledge, and scaffold practice for creativity.
Be Open
We never know which of our talents will end up being the ones that define us: it’s our job as parents to let our kids explore many aspects of their creativity.4 But our society has no idea what to do with polycreativity—creativity as an approach that permeates many areas of life and work. The idea of a Renaissance man, or competence in many fields, is a thing of the past. Take Ben Franklin, for example. A gifted politician, prolific inventor, orator, and writer, he was creative in many ways. Our culture no longer produces Ben Franklins.
We funnel, and we shape, and we require labels that prohibit creativity across multiple fields. If you’re a surgeon, be a surgeon, and we’ll expect to find you sleeping at the hospital. If you are a poet, write poetry, and we expect you to get a job teaching at a college somewhere. We give strange glances to surgeons who write poetry, and we wonder if they are working hard enough at their first job.
It’s fallacy to think that creativity comes in one form for each person: that a creative spark will fan into a single flame. Once you’ve been taught creative thinking and understand that it’s an okay—and even desirable—way to be, once you know that it’s not a have or have-not situation, once you stop looking over at Becky’s creative, artsy son with jealousy and instead start actually working on creativity as a skill with your own kids, once you practice it enough, then creative thinking will take over as your default. You don’t need to have an “artist” daughter or a “math-oriented” son. They can be both. Your daughter may forget the capital of Hungary, but using creativity as a tool, as an approach to tackling problems, whether in social conflicts or engineering dilemmas, will become who she is by force of habit. Our kids won’t undo brain interconnectivity—myelin sticks around; reinforced synapses are relatively permanent—because it is a way of living, developed simply through practice.
FOSTER OPENNESS IN YOUR KIDS
Parents can make a home environment open to creative thought. To do this, we must value novelty, we must allow failure, and we must not judge worth.
Encourage your children to come up with lots of ideas about everything. Ask them to be prolific. And then keep a notebook. Creative ideas can be fleeting, so write things down. You can do this, or your kids can: they can draw pictures of their ideas even before they can write about them. If they build something, take pictures. Time lines can help young kids envision how a project will come together or provide a planning structure for older kids. Make concept maps—a tool to show relationships by drawing lines between words—to capture and organize everything that is even remotely associated with their ideas: it’s the interconnectivity that matters.
Highly creative people actually have a subtle frontal lobe dysfunction—an inhibition of inhibition—where the frontal cortex allows an uninterrupted flow of creative thought processing from the lower brain areas.5 This may be a product of our experiences: sometime the frontal lobes decrease idea generation, in part, because the brain has been taught to evaluate an idea’s worth before it comes to conscious fruition.6
So, once those ideas spring up from kids, don’t comment on their worth. If you judge your child’s ideas tinged with negativity, they will learn to more tightly regulate their ideas. When my family went crabbing, my 5-year-old daughter said, “Can we cook it (the crab), make it red, and turn it into a tiny jewelry box?” Of course we can. If you judge other people in front of your children, it can have the same effect. You will teach your children to activate those brain prefrontal cortex areas that are involved in clamping down on divergent ideas.
When we discriminate against certain ideas based on our past experience, it hampers creativity. The one aspect of creativity that computers are quite good at is the ability to see one thing as something else. In human terms, we get trained to see an oil stain as a mess that needs to be cleaned up and not as a face, for example. Machines have no such predisposition. So, in that way, machines have more free will than humans do. This is an area that can handicap us when it comes to creativity, and this is where a perspective of openness can help. Remember, based on the principles of neuroscience, the pathways that we use the most are the most likely to fire again. Humans become wired to see things using the brain path most traveled.
GIVE EXPERIENCES
Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky maintained that every act of imagination has a long history, or incubation period. He theorized that a child’s prior experience provides tools for creativity and that the more a child hears, sees, and knows, the richer that child’s imagination will be.7 Experiential learning has been shown to increase creativity in school settings, and it works at home too.8–10
Every new thing a child experiences will become a tool in his creativity bucket. Now we need to get our children those experiences. Think about experience as a way to alter how our DNA is used and to potentially modify who a person is. Choose to give your child experiences instead of stuff for birthdays. The more open to new experience he is, the more he’ll get out of it.
ENRICH YOUR CHILD’S CULTURAL LANDSCAPE
Though we are marching toward a more global society, various ethnic groups traditionally do things quite differently, and the fresh perspective is valuable in creating an open child. Extensive multicultural experience makes kids more creative (measured by how many ideas they can come up with and by association skills) and allows them to capture unconventional ideas from other cultures to expand on their own ideas.
As a parent, you should expose your children to other cultures as often as possible. If you can, travel with your child to other countries; live there if possible. If neither is feasible, there are tons of things you can do at home, such as exploring local festivals, borrowing library books about other cultures, cooking foods from a different culture at your house once a month, interviewing someone you know who is from a different country, watching a TV show online from a different country, and practicing words in a different language.
Bilingual children grow up knowing that there are two very correct names for a car, for a bookshelf, for family. Bilingual brains have connections that are wired differently from a very early age, creating parallel pathways to the same concept or destination. Overwhelming research shows that bilingual individuals are more creative than monolinguals.11 They can more easily come up with new and unique ideas, and they are more willing to bend category rules a bit.12 Makes sense doesn’t it? They’ve been reaching the same conclusions through divergent ways for years.
With your younger children, you can look at the different side of the street that people drive on in Britain compared to America, the popularity of different sports in other countries, the people who traditionally make up the family unit in different cultures, how Americans and Mexican attitudes differ toward death (think Day of the Dead), or the stark difference in attitudes toward dogs in the American versus Islamic cultures. Teach your child another language if possible; simply exploring the differences between languages is valuable. There are countless ways that people say hello to each other every morning across the globe, and no way is more correct than any other.
If your child is open to the multicultural experience in the first place, she’ll get a lot more out of that exposure.13You can encourage an open attitude both toward the current culture in foreign countries and cultures from long ago by modeling that openness yourself. Any cross-cultural experience is fertile ground for creative thinking and can produce interesting conversations as you both observe and then reflect on what you experience. A neutral investigation of how different people explore the same ideas will show your children that one approach is not backward or wrong, but, instead, that views can just be different.
My husband and I prioritize travel as an experience that develops many things in our brains, including creativity and empathy. When we’ve scraped together enough money, or have enough room on the credit card to put six airline tickets on it, we go on vacation. We’ve never been to Walt Disney World, never done an “all inclusive” resort, never crammed into a cruise ship cabin. Instead, we pack rash guards, flip-flops, and a first-aid kit, and we hightail it down to Costa Rica to take up residence there with our four small children. The places we stay are not fine or fancy. We always go to the same area—a tiny town lined with dusty shacks, with a mountainous jungle rising steeply on one side and the roar of the ocean behind a thin veil of vegetation on the other. We all stay in one room, with the kids’ cots propped up off the floor to avoid the scorpions.
We bring our family to Central America not because we thrive on difficulty or danger, but because we’re searching for a space that values creativity. Our kids see our Central American friends (heavily populated by ex-pats we’ve met over the years) running a small bakery, teaching yoga, starting a surf school, making jewelry, having babies without husbands. They see motorcycles pass between a frenzy of trucks on unpaved, dusty roads. They hide our food in outdoor kitchen cabinets from the monkeys, and they gather hermit crabs as friends. We dive down as deep as we can into this alternate world in the limited time we have there.
Another parent I know, Margriet, a Canadian artist, is raising her 3-year-old daughter in Costa Rica. She believes that creativity naturally springs up from all children, and it’s her job to channel it, encourage it, and steep her daughter in it. She hopes that moving there as a single woman and opening an art café, as a place to both make a living and sell her art, will one day serve as a clear sign to her daughter that all paths are open to her.
To make real use of these quiet spaces to get creatively connected, the brain needs to use the pathways between creativity brain regions repeatedly. As a neuroscientist, I know that the value of my family’s multicultural immersions far outweighs the negative aspects that come packaged with it. The influence of parents on creativity cannot be understated. If we truly value creativity, then our children will also value it.
The Duncker Candle Problem
The Duncker candle problem is a classic test of creative insight. First, you are given some tools (a candle, a pack of matches, and a box of tacks), all placed on a table next to a cardboard wall. Then you are given a task: you must attach the candle to the wall so that when the candle burns, it doesn’t drip wax on the table or the floor. The solution involves the ability to envision a different use for the objects at hand. Several studies have shown that the longer people had spent living abroad, the more likely they were to come up with the creative solution, particularly if they still maintained ties with their original culture.14, 15
Did you come up with the correct solution? You need to empty the box of tacks and then tack it to the wall to hold the candle—a candleholder is a valid use for the box, but it’s not the original use.16
Share Knowledge
Experiences, and what we do with them, become knowledge that we can use as a tool for the creative process. Giving our kids experiences is a powerful way to give them knowledge and to teach, but there are other ways too.
READ A LOT
Travel isn’t the only way to visit someplace else. Reading is a great (and cheap) way to expose your child to new ideas, fantasy worlds, and other cultures, as well as to explore the nuts and bolts behind lots of interesting processes in how-things-work books. Reading not only taps into the reader’s imagination, but as your child assimilates someone else’s social or historical experience into her own understanding of the world, it also adds to her own creative palate.
MODEL CREATIVITY
Modeling creativity helps a kid become an expert. Observation has a potent effect on creativity. The simple act of watching someone be creative enhances your imagination, even if the creative process you watch has nothing to do with your own work. One study allowed children to watch a video demonstrating creative behavior, watch a video talking about creative behavior, or read a book designed to promote creative ideas. Children who watched the actual creative behavior scored higher than the other groups on creativity tests afterward.17 Sometimes you just need to see the process at work. This means you should participate in the creative activity with your child or expose them to other creators.
Victoria is a British-born designer who captures beach and animal scenes in watercolor images. As an artist, she lived in New York City for years designing dinnerware and towels for Crate and Barrel, Williams Sonoma, and Pier 1. She now has her own textile line based in North Carolina called A Good Catch. She tells about how her father had demonstrated artistic principles for her when she was young. “My dad went to Japan, and he came back and brought watercolor brushes and watercolors for the first time,” she said. “He taught me how to paint a shark. You know how a shark goes from dark grey to light underneath? It was a really nice way to demonstrate the dark to the light. It was a shark coming towards you, with the tail coming out the side. It was neat. I remember it vividly, so clearly, him showing me that.”
A study that asked subjects to draw aliens to inhabit an Earthlike planet showed that exposure to examples early on during the creative process enhances creativity and the quality of the drawing, maybe because the first step in the creative process involves recall, or bringing things to mind that can be used in the process.18 But showing examples later in the process may increase conformity. So, consider showing your children examples of famous buildings way before you show them how to construct a tower with frozen peas and toothpicks.
ALLOW YOUR CHILD TO BECOME AN EXPERT IN SOMETHING
Teaching things creates opportunity as well. Your son could spend his piano practice time just playing whatever comes to mind, but a bit of instruction would make that music easier to hear. Exploration makes sense for a very young child, but once he’s old enough to read music, it would be perhaps more useful to make him practice specific songs—to become proficient at music someone else has written before he tackles making up his own music. That’s where knowledge as a creative foundation comes in.
If your children are interested in a topic, encourage it. Allow them to wallow in it and learn all about it. Creativity can come once you have all the basics down and you know the ins and outs of your craft. Especially in advanced fields, where invention builds on prior knowledge, you can’t defend bending the rules until you know the rules. I think about this in my own profession as a scientist. It’s impossible to think differently about the impact of a toxin on cellular pathways, for example, unless you are first familiar with those pathways. You must have foundational knowledge to be creative in an advanced field. The mind of an expert works differently from that of a novice: experts have a well-organized knowledge base and so can deal more effectively with new information that may paralyze a novice.19 Understanding your field allows you to evaluate the utility of new information to solve a problem, as well as to understand how older information may be applicable to new situations.
Give Space
Understand that enhancing creativity takes both passive and active parental support. Both are important to the creative process. Remember that the creator prepares with knowledge and then thinks about the idea for a bit before having the illumination and fruition of the idea. That part takes time. Your job is to help your child make connections between as many things as possible. Make the space to let that happen.
In our social networking worlds, we are focused on the best way to do absolutely everything—posting perfect kids’ birthday party pictures to Pinterest and posting photos of our kids holding up their college acceptance letters on Instagram. And although Americans value unique, alternative ways of being proficient at something, we tend to value only the ideas, not the thing that generates the ideas—namely, the quiet space that leads to creativity. But creativity is not about the best, or most proficient, way to do something. Creativity is a source of innovation and of new ways of thinking. It allows the mind to play. It allows society to advance, to branch, to illuminate.
One of the reasons we see creativity draining from the pool of our next generation is the willingness of parents to step in and help. Don’t fix it for them. Remember that necessity is the mother of invention. Why would our kids need to problem solve if that’s done for them? The answer here is to make space in every way for creative thought to become a habit.
We are always stepping in to prevent our kids from being bored, to keep them happy. It is not your job as a parent to entertain your children. In fact, it is no one’s job to entertain your children. Finding things to engage with in the world is a life skill that can take practice for some people. Having “nothing to do” allows for reflection time. Being disengaged—or even bored—can lead to creative inspiration.
DON’T FORCE CREATIVITY
If the first rule of innovation is pleasure, we have to remember that pleasure typically doesn’t come with something you’re forced to do, so creativity can’t be bribed. The idea of bribes works great for enhancing self-control (as we’ll see in chapter 11), but for creativity it may backfire. These are pathways that need openness, free reign, and no social expectations on what they produce. That’s why an open attitude must come first. You want to show interest, make space for it, and then get out of the way.
Kids should know you value creativity, but requiring it can squash it. It’s funny how a child’s motivation to perform a creative task, such as creating a short cartoon graphic novel, for example, may be crushed when a teacher offers to give extra credit for it. It’s far easier to crush intrinsic motivation than to instill it in someone, so if you see your daughter working with gusto on a project that makes her happy, stay well enough away!
Creativity as an Emotional Outlet
Do you create more when you’re in a good mood? While that makes sense because the dopamine system is involved in creativity and mood, studies show that not being in a good mood can enhance creativity.20 Last week, I put my daughter in a time-out on the porch to calm down after an altercation with her sister. After she came out a few minutes later, I noticed an intricate pattern of clothespins and seashells carefully arranged on the porch railing. She’ll create while reflecting on how she feels. She’ll create when she feels upset. Creativity can be a healthy outlet for channeling how we feel. There’s conflicting evidence about whether being in a good mood or a bad mood is more likely to yield creative output; it may be dependent on the particular person. As a parent, you can teach your children how to use creativity as an emotional outlet, regardless of their mood.
MAKE TIME FOR CREATIVITY
To be creative, you have to make creativity a priority. To be creative, you have to do it. Set time aside for it. Keep working at it. Don’t accept the first solution. Generate multiple solutions. You can’t choose the best one if you only have one. The first solution that pops up is rarely the one that is different and outside the box.
You can’t force creativity, but you can practice it—not in the same way that you make someone practice the piano, though. Practicing creativity can mean purposefully setting up a situation that will permit creativity and then stepping out of the way as a parent. You simply need to make space for creativity in your value system: by the moments you set apart for it, in the way you encourage your kids to deal with conflict, and by how you allow your children to make space within your parenting.
ENCOURAGE FREE PLAY
Free play should be a huge part of your child’s life. It contributes to cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development, but importantly for this conversation, self-directed play increases creativity.21 A study of 5- and 6-year-olds showed that preschoolers who participated in a simple 75-minute play session per week had higher verbal and graphic creativity scores at the end of the school year than peers who didn’t, and they also had better-developed creative personality traits and behaviors.22
Not only is play related to greater creativity and imagination, but also to higher reading levels and IQ scores.23 Based on the evidence, the equation consistently comes out as Play = Learning. In 1974, scientist Art Fry dreamed up the idea of Post-it Notes during a nontraditional work setup at the 3M company. 3M’s 15 percent program, launched in 1948 and extended to every employee on the technical team, allows 3M employees to take a chunk of their own workday to follow whatever they are interested in. Google and Hewlett-Packard also offer personal creative time. These methods seem most effective in a creative culture, where employees can present their work to each other and aim to impress.24
At the 3M company, the 15 percent program translates to a daily adult free-play session. Since free play is the natural way that children explore the world, the time children devote to daily creative play should be much, much higher. Along these same lines, don’t overschedule your children. If every moment is spent in a directed activity, there’s no time to simply free play, no time to try things on their own terms, no time to make their own new neural connections.
CONSIDER MAKING A PHYSICAL CREATION SPACE
Creating physical space for kids can be somewhat dependent on the type of creativity, but your children should know that there’s a place set aside where they can be nothing but inventive. I have found no published evidence that setting aside physical space to be creative enhances creativity, but there is certainly a long historical precedence for writers who have a dedicated writing space or visual artists who maintain a studio. There are no specific requirements for the space that you pick, and it will be somewhat dependent on your living arrangements. It can be as small as a table or as large as a room. If you identify an interest within your child, you should run with it. I established a Lego corner for my son—a building fanatic—a designated space with no parental complaining about pieces on the floor and where completed projects could live indefinitely.
This summer, I set aside a corner of our admittedly run-down garage to be dedicated to art. I bought mistinted gallon paint cans for a few dollars at our local hardware store and put them in various bottles. I let my kids pour, smear, and push the paint around real canvases or gessoed cardboard. The kids got filthy, I hosed them off, and those works of art took weeks to dry. I contacted a local coffee shop, which graciously allowed my kids to hang their works of art on the walls, and we had a tiny art show opening event. What did my kids learn from that? Hopefully, their brains learned that art for the sake of art is valuable, that it’s okay to get messy (and I mean messy), that they can be proud of their creative projects, and that creativity is satisfying.
GIVE YOUR CHILD ENOUGH SLEEP
Sleep and the creative process are intimately related. First, sleep allows memories with important emotional or motivational value to be better incorporated into our brains, and activation of these circuits during dreaming can enhance memory, allow us to better regulate our emotions in social situations, and improve creativity.25 Intact REM sleep, which typically happens in intermittent periods throughout the night, appears to be particularly important for creative problem-solving.26
It’s interesting to me that patterns of brain activation are the same during REM sleep and during the creative process when we’re awake. Take the example of jazz improvisation in musicians, which is a spontaneous creative activity. While making music, the musician’s dorsolateral part of the prefrontal cortex, which consciously controls performance, is turned off, and the medial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in internally motivated behaviors, is activated.27 You see those same high and low activation patterns during REM sleep, showing similarities between sleep and the awake creative process.28
The second reason to make sure your child gets enough rest is that there’s also a potential link between dreaming—particularly lucid dreaming—and creativity. Some historically monumental ideas had their origin in dreams, including the discovery of the structure of the benzene molecule by the organic chemist August Kekulé; the idea for the frog heart experiment that won Otto Loewi a Nobel Prize; the invention of the sewing machine by Elias Howe; and the rather dreamlike creation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
DISCONNECT FROM DEVICES TO MAKE MENTAL SPACE
Call it what you will: meditation, reflection, mindfulness. Research shows that creativity increases as you step away from your electronic devices and immerse yourself in nature for a few days—if you can make it through the disconnection syndrome, that is.29
Maria, filmmaker and creative director of a production company, and Paul, CEO of a large corporation in Europe, are a German couple who go to Costa Rica each December for several weeks. They view their holiday with an intense clarity of purpose: it allows them to be more efficient and more creative when they return home. The unapologetic way they discuss their trip rationale is both refreshing and thought-provoking: the yearly multicultural disconnection is an absolute requirement for their work productivity.
When we’re in Costa Rica, we disconnect our children from electronics, from their normal life patterns, and from their comfortable ways of living so that they have the space they need to create. We want our children bored stiff, reading books for adults they find in a friend’s art café. We want them desperate enough for TV that they watch whatever few cartoons they encounter in an unknown language with no complaints.
But it’s not always the most popular tactic. I have a friend who traveled with her 15-year-old daughter to Costa Rica last year. While hiking near a remote waterfall, her daughter stood at the bottom, tears streaming down her face. “It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?” my friend said to her. “No,” her daughter said, “I don’t have my phone.” Did she want to post a picture of it on Snapchat? Did she want to tweet about it to her friends? The why doesn’t matter; she was unable to be in the waterfall moment without that social framework. And this presents a very big problem for our brains.
Welcome to the new sense of social connection. We currently experience our life moments through singular internet photographs and counting our “likes.” We perhaps are connected not so deeply, but we have many more points to hang from. We bat around things that are already on the internet, look for affirmation, and ride waves of popular opinion looking for the next thing that has a finger on the pulse of the nation. The change from veritable relationships to virtual connections seems not like a change at all for our children. This is the way it’s always been for them. But this swift change in social interactions is unprecedented in our evolutionary history, and I’m not so sure that the human brain is ready for it.
Perhaps even more problematic for my friend’s daughter is the instant deflection and volley of the moment to a social media platform. If she had had her phone, her immediate reflection about the waterfall moment would have consisted of sharing it on social media. I like to share a nice waterfall picture too, but we need to preserve the space for our kids to be mindful about things first—and allow social media second. I’m reminded of the internet video I watched yesterday of a giant alligator in a South Carolina neighborhood, and though I know I was supposed to be awestruck by its slow but hefty amble across the residential street, I was distracted by the man literally getting out of his car next to the gator in order to get good video footage. It’s not good to get out of a car next to an alligator.
It will be good for our children and everyone around them if they can experience the amazing things that spring from just being present for a minute, mentally disconnected from social media. Kids may not miss personal mindful moments, especially if they’ve never experienced them, but parents can see the utility of these moments and enforce some level of media detachment for them. We need our children to put themselves first, process things, and then share what they’ve found with the rest of the world.
The first part of disconnection can be painful—the second part deeply rewarding. Being connected all the time means that we’re not getting quiet space to think and reflect and create and be deliberate. There’s someone always “with” us. Sometimes we can easily dismiss the Eastern tradition of creativity as a sense of self-fulfillment or realization because we wonder where the value is in “doing nothing.” But there is absolute value in that nothing. Leonardo da Vinci recommended gazing at stains on a wall or similar random marks as a stimulus to creative fantasy. A game where you see something in nothing is creativity.
When we marginalize the Eastern perspective of creativity, we essentially eliminate the spaces where the Western ideas of creativity can take root. In reality, the true nature of creativity pulls both from self-reflection and purpose. It’s the marriage of both thinking inwardly and thinking outwardly into an expression of something another person can appreciate.
Scaffold Practice for Creativity
We can raise creative kids if we generate opportunities to be creative, and so make creativity a habit. To change neuronal development and brain connections in a long-lasting way, your children need time to create. They need to practice the skill of being imaginative daily. But it can happen in small ways. Scaffolded creativity practice can occur by smuggling in some creative time. And creative practice doesn’t have to all be hands-on, either. Remember, you are encouraging a way of thinking, not a concrete talent in studio art or architectural design.
We can “teach to the test” at home by planting some scaffolded practice. Sometimes you need to start your kids off by modeling creativity. Your kids might struggle with the idea of free play at first. They’ll pop up right beside you and ask for direction. Get them set up. Get them started. Arrange a game with race cars or set up a stuffed animal tea party. Spend 5 minutes, create a scenario, and then leave them alone. Do it more than once; try it daily for a week before deciding it doesn’t work.
You can try an overt idea-generation session. If you incorporate 5 minutes per day into your life for your child to be creative, that’s 150 minutes a month. By the end of a year, you will have given your child 30 hours of practice in divergent thinking! Ask the creativity test question: How many uses can you think of for a paperclip? Name things that are round, things that have wheels. You become what you practice. These activities are easy to do in the car, while you’re making dinner, or as a daily bedtime exercise. You may be surprised at how connected you feel to your child afterward!
Try to keep your child engaged with a question or task for 5 minutes, and help your child to follow a train of thought to its conclusion. If your child stalls, you can offer some ideas of your own to jumpstart the process (remember that presenting examples can spark the creative process early on). Some of the following activities are modeled after the standard tests of creativity used by neuropsychologists, but in this case teaching to the test is a good thing:
Possible choices. Pause a movie right after the conflict and ask about all the options that the main character has. Which will she pick? Do this during a board book, a sitcom, an issue you run into at the drive-thru.
Alternative uses. Give your child a tool they’ve never seen before and ask them to describe potential uses for it. Pick up anything that’s nearby and ask your child what it could be used for (other than the original intention).
Idea generation. Have a round-robin story session where you pass a story around, taking turns adding details to it as you go. You can even have recurring characters, like mean ol’ Randy who does marginally inappropriate things.
Product improvement. Hand your child a stuffed animal in the cart at Target and ask him what he’d do to improve it.
Possible consequences. Present a hypothetical or real situation and ask your child to name all the possible consequences of the action.
“Suppose” questions. Ask what would happen if people didn’t have to sleep. Maybe your kids will tell you there’d be no need for pajamas anymore or that work productivity will increase, that vampires would have to change their night habits, that the birth rate would decrease. You never know until you ask.
Asking questions. Show your child an ambiguous picture and have her ask as many questions as she can about it. Ask a sibling to answer her questions. Resist the urge to explain anything.
Guessing causes. Give a hypothetical or real action and ask why someone would choose to act in that way. Last week, an angry driver in the car next to us chucked the McDonald’s burger she was eating through our SUV’s window. It hit my 13-year-old in the face. We played this backstory “game” when he got home as a way to understand the event: Why would she have thrown that food at a car with a child in it? With her own kids in the car? What happened to her that morning? Where did she grow up? What is her occupation? What did she get for Christmas this year? Does she celebrate Christmas?
Playing games. Catherine, a neuroscientist who cofounded a company called Catlilli Games, suggests that parents encourage their children to play certain games, such as Mad Libs, Scattergories, Dixit, or Story Cubes. These games are fun to play, but they also incorporate ideas from creativity tests and allow us to practice making unusual connections. Games that solve puzzles, idea-generating games, and games where the goal is to figure out something (even old standards like Pictionary or charades) are fantastic ways to generate creativity.
Pictorial creativity. Draw a squiggle line and ask your child to turn it into a work of art. My kids love this drawing game and beg to do it instead of a bedtime story, so in the last few weeks we’ve done it a handful of times. Their pictures are always so much better than mine.
You may think that these exercises are simply a fun diversion, but don’t underestimate the power of these experiences. My son found me today in the kitchen and laid out an array of smooth creek rocks on the table. He had used a marking pen to draw a picture of a drone on one, with an accompanying small rock remote control. He created the Titanic on a rock and turned another into the iceberg that it hit (these rocks were to scale). These small practices are allowing him to connect disparate thoughts in his brain and are strengthening his creative process. I can’t wait until this translates into the way he approaches a tough legal case or allows him to negotiate a peace treaty with a difficult nation as a grown-up one day.
Sometimes we play an alphabetical game at dinner based on a theme. We go around the table and offer an idea that fits our assigned letter. For example: “What does our dog do at home while we’re away all day?” She plays video games, quietly eats ice cream, rearranges the furniture, swings in the hammock, tinkles in the toilet. . . .” It’s funny and surprising. Their minds are amazing.
Ideally, you’d also have a larger project at least once a month, like dragging the paints out to a scenic location or building a double-decker train track that lives in the living room all weekend. A longer creative session allows your children to be totally immersed in the creative activity and lets them experience all four stages of creativity (preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification). Importantly, spending more time working on a project may make it more likely for the last stages of illumination and verification to occur.
When we practice creativity, our family’s not always playing idea-generation games or painting outside. We’re often just lining things up so that it’s more likely that creativity will happen.
Creativity and Honesty
Studies show that creative people can be more likely to lie or cheat and more likely to justify it afterward than people who score lower on creativity assessments.30That might result from a creative tendency to view rules not as concrete, but instead as something to navigate through or around. If you notice your child bending the truth, refer to part 3, “Fostering Compassion,” and part 4, “Cultivating Self-Control” for parenting tips.