Apr 7, 2020
Why Creativity is the Strongest Bond with your Child
Try the most important 5 steps to inspire creativity
Creative thinking must be encouraged and celebrated throughout our entire life, starting from a young age.
Supporting creativity from an early age and throughout life has to start with parents, yet very few parents understand how they can be their child’s Creative Muse.
These 5 steps from the full Creativitee 9 Step Program enables parents and their children to embark together on a journey towards a lifetime love of creativity.
Many parents are aware of the importance of creativity but lack the knowledge and personal experience to effectively teach their kids creativity.
In fact, it’s not so much creative teaching as it is appreciating how being your child’s Muse can be the most effective method of developing creative kids.
Parents can set up a creative kid learning center in the family home. This is in fact a key enabling component of ensuring your personal creativity program achieves the desired outcomes where you and your child discover that to be creative there has to be an element of bravery, “to never be afraid to hang your art on the wall”.
Here are the essential 5 steps
Step 1: create your home art gallery
Ideally, this should be a wall in your home that is visible to everyone. Often there’s a gallery of sorts in your child’s bedroom. It is far better if it’s a wall that everyone in the family and visitors can readily see.
A simple first creative step is to ask your child to give the “gallery” a name and to create a sign that is the first item you hang in the gallery.
So, that’s a great start. You have a gallery that is open to the whole family and it has a name and a sign.
This small start should be celebrated, in fact, every creative work you do together should be celebrated in some way.
Suggestion: a great way to celebrate your child's creative output is to share it with a much-loved family member like a grandparent. Hopefully, the grandparents use tech like Facetime, but even if they can get an SMS with a photo of the gallery it will be enough. The sharing of the new gallery is an opportunity for your child to explain that the gallery will be where she/he hangs their creative work.
Step 2: Go on an Adventure Together
Creativity, in essence, is about going to places you’ve never been, like having an adventure.
It’s actually true for you and your child and even if you don’t initially embrace that idea, then please learn to pretend that you’re excited and to have conversations about the concept that you and your child will have a “creative” adventure together.
The creative process is about interpreting the world you and your child live in and the experiences you have together. The output of your creativity is how you reflect on the world in which you live, the experiences you have and what you imagine — it all adds up to your interpretation of life and how you view yourself and other people.
Suggestion: the adventures you will have are a process of discovering what you don’t know, so an adventure is likely to be taking a fresh look at familiar surroundings or taking a first look at new surroundings. In either case, it’s the parent’s role to help your child think creatively and this is best done using a style of questions that encourage your child to think deeply before answering.
Step 3: Encourage Free Expression
It probably needn’t be said, however, it’s important not to constrain nor overly guide your child’s creativity.
A creative output could be as simple as collecting 10 different types of leaves from the garden and pasting them on an A3 sheet of paper.
The way you can encourage creative expression is to act as your child’s creative muse.
Suggestion: adapting the notion of creativity to suit young children is to put the emphasis on the creative process, rather than to judge the quality of what they produce. It’s very likely that a young child may not have developed all the skills needed to achieve a superlative creative outcome. In fact, we’re not seeking superlative outcomes, we’re seeking confirmation that the child is thoughtfully creating and is able to explain the story of their art.
Step 4: Hang Your Art on the Wall
This mantra to “never be afraid to hang your art on the wall”, will sound trite.
In fact, it is the exact opposite of trite. You could reflect on your own life and about, “hanging your art on the wall”. How often has your creativity been encouraged and how often have you hung your art and exposed yourself to comments and criticisms? If you’re a fairly typical citizen of a western democracy, it’s likely that you haven’t created or hung much art.
It’s very important to help your child become comfortable with this concept and it’s one reason why I recommended making a gallery in an area of your home that everyone sees. It’s a good experience for your child to receive all manner of feedback and that you help your child to actively seek and welcome all feedback.
Suggestion: a very important aspect of the creative cycle is for your child to experience that her/his art has inspired others. Going back to the grandparent's involvement, an excellent way to make this real is for grandma or grandpa to write to your child, yes an old-fashioned letter, explaining that they were so inspired by your child’s art that they too created some art, which they enclosed, and could your child please hang it in the family gallery. This completes a cycle of creativity that inspires creativity in a person your child is close to.
Step 5: Enjoy the Aha Moments
As you work together with your child, it’s vital that you are conscious of observing her/his creative process. As I mentioned the creative output may not initially appear sophisticated or accomplished. The point is to be aware of your child demonstrating thoughtful insights. You can encourage thoughtfulness by the questions you ask.
It could be as simple as asking your child, “why do your stick figures all look like Daddy?”, or, “how do the colors of the leaves you pasted make you feel?”
The act of acknowledging your child’s creative processes is crucial in helping your child to be aware of the impact of their creative output, no matter how rudimentary.
Suggestion: Creativity becomes more recognizable when parents are more attentive to the cognitive processes of their child than to the results they achieve in various fields of doing and understanding. If parents really focus on observing their child’s creative thinking, then the Aha moments will be obvious and can be enjoyed. Literally say, “Aha, so now I see why placed those leaves that way”. If you are focused and observing, I can guarantee your child will constantly surprise you and give you plenty of opportunities to exclaim, “Aha”.
Final thoughts
By encouraging creativity and imagination, we are promoting children’s ability to explore and comprehend their world and increasing their opportunities to make new connections and reach new understandings.
If we don’t provide environments in which the creativity and imagination of the very youngest learners are helped to flourish, we are failing to support children at the stage when it is needed the most.
Creativity can be encouraged and taught to any age and in any setting including high schools, colleges, and organizations.
The program can also be applied to any age group, as well as for retirees and the elderly who reside in nursing homes.
About the author:
Greg Twemlow is the Founder of https://www.creativit.ee/, the developer of https://www.creativit.ee/blog/teaching-creativity-9-step-program and Founder of the registered charity, https://www.sevenmile.org.au/
If any of the following issues are important to you then the Cretivitee program will be a vital guide for your role as a parent:
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