Creativity is a child’s own perspective of looking at things, people, and events. But how can you encourage your child to be more creative?
Most people grew up believing that creativity is innate – it’s either you have it or you don’t have it. However, I believe that every person has the potential to produce something interesting and awe-inspiring, and the difference between so-called creative people and their non-creative counterparts is that the former are aware of their abilities. This way, they tune in more to the ideas that float around in their heads.
To tap into a child’s creative streak, parents should provide two things: motivation and opportunities. Remember, children are naturally curious and inventive. All you have to do is give them room to grow. Even if creativity is innate, it still has to be motivated early on and nurture. If not, the child’s interest will go elsewhere. Parents have to be watchful and sensitive to the inclination of their kids. Example is a great motivator. What parents do and how they think provide great examples for creativity. Without a doubt, parents are the most important resource for children to grow into their ingenuity.
A terrific way to encourage exploration of ideas is to provide kids with unstructured playtime and open-ended supplies to tinker with. Kids should never run out of learning toys and materials that can be manipulated in many ways, such as clay, paper, building blocks, and various scrap items. It will also help a lot if you enroll your kids in different workshops because it’s a different kind of motivation to experience working on art projects with a group of kids. Workshops also give your kids confidence; they will get a feeling that they are more advanced because they are exposed to more materials and more media.
How parents react to their kids’ creative efforts can make or break a child’s budding creativity. Parents should react with affirmation because this is essential to how a child views himself, his work, and his ideas. The wrong feedback can cause a child to feel insecure or even withdraw. If an adult negatively reacts to a child’s drawing of a car, expect the child to be scared to draw on his own next time. He becomes inhibited. He will start to think that there is only one way of drawing or coloring a car because the adult has already imprinted a template in his mind. So, what can you do? What should you do if what your child is building or drawing makes no sense? Whatever it looks like, what’s vital is making a child feel good about his work. Inhibition is the worse enemy of self-expression, therefore, of creativity. Inhibition is very difficult to unlearn. It may take years to rebuild a crushed self-confidence.
The photo above was drawn by my son. He started with just simple characters until he learned to draw complicated and more elaborate photos of anime characters. At first he was hesitant to put colors into his drawing because he said he didn’t know how, until he tried and he liked the outcome. I’ve always encouraged him to draw ever since he showed signs of interest in it, that’s why during our yearly Christmas exchange gifts at home, he always receives drawing pads, pencils, and coloring pencils from either me, her Dad or one of her sisters.
Parents should provide the stimuli, with a sense of when to press the brakes. They have to learn when to give and when to hold back. The child is an individual who needs to develop by himself to become the person he really is. To grow, he needs room to maneuver, to make mistakes.
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