Stimulating Your Child’s Creativity
(in Brainy-Child.com)
According to the experts, it is possible to encourage or inhibit the development and expression of creativity in young children. Most theories of child development view young children as highly creative, with a natural tendency to fantasize, experiment, and explore their physical and conceptual environment. However this high level of creativity is not necessarily maintained throughout childhood and into adulthood. The level of creativity declines when they start the kindergarten and peaks again when they reach puberty.
Creativity is essentially a form of problem solving. But it is a special type of problem solving–one that involves problems for which there are no easy answers: that is, problems for which popular or conventional responses do not work. Creativity involves adaptability and flexibility of thought. These are the same types of skills that numerous reports on education have suggested are critical for students.
For a proper understanding of children’s creativity, one must distinguish creativity from intelligence and talent. Researcher has argued that intelligence and creativity are independent of each other, and a highly creative child may or may not be highly intelligent. Creativity goes beyond possession and use of artistic or musical talent. In this context, talent refers to the possession of a high degree of technical skill in a specialized area. Thus an artist may have wonderful technical skills, but may not succeed in evoking the emotional response that makes the viewer feel that a painting, for example, is unique. It is important to keep in mind that creativity is evidenced not only in music, art, or writing, but also throughout the curriculum, in science, social studies and other areas.
Is your child creative? Creativity can be assessed informally by parents or teachers, or formally by tests and the experts. One of the more common tests is “alternative uses” test, whereby the test subject is asked to think of as many uses as possible for a common object. For example, when we ask four-year-olds to tell us “all the things they can think of that are red,” we find that children not only list wagons, apples and cardinals, but also chicken pox and cold hands. These tests assess divergent thinking and are usually scored in relation to both the quantity and the quality of the answers. Children’s responses may be either popular or original, with the latter considered evidence of creative potential.
For young children, the focus of creativity should remain on process, i.e. the “generation of ideas”. Adult acceptance of multiple ideas in a non-evaluative atmosphere will help children generate more ideas.