One way to gauge creativity is the assessment of divergent thinking – the ability to come up with many responses to a question, to be contrasted with convergent thinking – the ability to come up with the correct answer to a problem. For example, to answer the question “how many uses can you think of for a brick?”, a divergent thinker would come up with many more uses for the brick than a typical convergent thinker.
Children, as young as toddlers, already exhibit divergent creativity. It’s what I observed from my son at 2 years old – “There is a broken piece of hose in the garden, twice his height in length. I’ve seen him treating it as: a leaf blower – half of it dangling behind his back, half in front as he steers it around, a tree trimmer, a water hose, and a feeding tube, as he tries to feed me “food” with it.
He found a pinecone in the garden and has become amusingly attached to it. At first it was just a fir cone, like the one he saw in Pooh Bear. But now with its petals mostly gone except for the bottom ones, he’s been calling it a space capsule.
Speaking of flight objects, here is his presentation of a rocket, to be built in the following exact order: first the yoga mat is rolled and stood up vertically, then a tub of play-dough is fitted evenly and snugly into the hole in the middle of the yoga mat. Then the back roller is piled on top to complete the construction of the rocket.
I bought him a stool, he rolled it to the side and turned it into a steering wheel. As he made the beep beep sound, one of the feet was now the horn as he pushed his palm on it.”
As we grow older, our brain accumulates experiences, exposing us to other types of creativity. One is lateral creativity – the ability to analogize an area’s properties and apply them to another. For example, apply techniques from reading a painting to reading poetry or apply math skills to understanding music. Another type of creativity is system thinking – by applying a systematic approach to different areas of study. For example, utilize systems engineering methodology from designing gardens, aircrafts, medicine, to addressing social challenges.
Dr. Arne Dietrich classifies creative thinking into 2 categories – the cognitive and the emotional. Within each category, it is further broken down into the deliberate and the spontaneous. An example of being deliberately cognitive is Thomas Edison who famously failed ten thousand times before perfecting the incandescent electric light bulb. On the other hand, Newton supposedly discovering gravity through observing an apple falling down from its tree would be an example of being spontaneously cognitive. Writers and poets tend to be in the deliberate emotional category, though plenty a poem come in a heartbeat. In her TED talk, Elizabeth Gilbert mentioned the American poet Ruth Stone, who would feel and hear a poem come barreling down over the landscape like a thunderous train of air. At times, the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would continue on across the landscape. At other times, she would grab a pencil and reach out with her other hand to catch the poem by its tail and pull it backwards into her body, and the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards, from the last word to the first.
So, how do we instill creativity in our children? Creativity is such a hot commodity in our times that it must be assumed that every parent wants it for theirs. But first, we should ask ourselves why. There are several reasons we may want our children to be creative. One is to mold them into celebrities. To turn your child into a star, take the point of view of Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor and self-described “Tiger Mom”. She wrote the memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, about raising children in Chinese style, with an emphasis on discipline, tough love, and excellence over Western-style parenting.
Others may want creativity as a career boost for their children, so that they may do well professionally. For these parents, having creativity is akin to having a credential to shore up their children’s college applications or work resumes. To groom your child into a successful company man, look to Google’s 80/20 policy, which granted employees 20% time for creative side projects. The fraction specifics likely came from the Pareto Principle, which states that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes.
The third reason is for personal enrichment. If we just want creativity as something to improve our children’s satisfaction with life, let them explore themselves in their own free time. Let them do nothing – it’s a good exercise for the mind. Let them be bored – it should lead them to things that distract them from boredom. Give them the resources they need to pursue their interests within your capability. No child ever faults their parents for not being able to provide resources to follow their curiosity. But plenty a child have faulted their parents for being overly strict and controlling.
Finally, perhaps disappointingly, it must be said that no amount of helicoptering will turn your child into Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was given up for adoption by his own parents. His adopted father was a car salesman, his adopted mother a bookkeeper. Beside founding Apple, Steve lived an exciting life filled with adventures and explorations, all contributing to the person that he was.
hardlyplaying.blog 