Encourage Creativity In Your Children

Creativity is, in a way, an attitude towards life, the result of a decision. The creative person is someone who takes risks, who is not afraid to make mistakes. And, above all, that he is capable of learning from his mistakes. You can help your child to maintain and develop their creativity, one of the characteristics that contribute to human beings to develop fully.

Human beings are creating all the time. Take a look around you: You live surrounded by creativity. The city you live in, the vehicles you travel in, the clothes you wear, the shoes you wear, the pillow your head rests on every night, was, before being materialized, in the mind of someone who had an idea and put it to the test until it worked.

The point is that ideas by themselves do not represent solutions to problems ; For them to be, it is necessary to develop them, materialize them and put them to the test against the problem to be solved and thus know if it really works.

This process is part of creative development and it is from this process that solutions to problems – big or small of humanity – emerge. Creativity means putting your imagination to work.

How to help your child to foster their creativity?

To develop his creativity, first of all, your child must find his element. And what is that to find your element? Well, sure, you have already heard the phrase of is in its element or moves like a fish in water, which refer to when a person develops naturally in something, when he does something with such skill and taste that it seems that he was born to do what he does.

Start practicing with yourself, to question yourself and you will see that there are tasks that you are very good at and you don’t even know why and others that you are fatal. The same goes for most people, they are all creative, they are all doing something at all times, but only some feel like a fish in water …

“To be in your element, you have to love what you do;  the key is passion. If you love something, if you are passionate about something and you are good at it, as Confucius said, you never go back to work, because you live the life that corresponds to you. You become your most authentic self, ”said Ken Robinson, who published a book called The Element: Discovering Your Passion Changes Everything , in which he hints at how you can help your children foster their creativity.

You as a mother, to guide your children to find their element and, consequently, to help them foster their creativity, before looking at the world around them, you must observe your children very carefully. See what inspires them, what layer their attention. Who is it or who are they? What are the things that excite you? What are the things that you are attracted to, or the things that cause you rejection? From there, you must promote their tastes and talents and help them develop them.

And from there derives another piece of advice: It may sound harsh, but rather than encouraging their children’s creativity, they must learn not to stop it. Children are creative beings par excellence, above all, because they do not have concepts that limit them, they do not know if what they do is right or wrong, it is beautiful or ugly, they just follow their instincts and create freely. From so much trying and trying they develop skills that some consider special. 

Passion enhances creativity

Another important element to foster creativity is connecting with passion. Discover your passion changes everything. Those who do not work but who dedicate themselves to playing all day know it, who passionately, with discipline, patience and dedication develop their skills in an activity that can be playing an instrument with mastery or elaborating mechanical parts.

You can be creative with anything : you can be a very creative mathematician and you can also be a creative chemist, a creative interviewer, a creative teacher, a creative academic, a creative musician… You can be creative with anything that involves intelligence!

The development of creativity implies control

It is necessary to clarify that whoever creates to create is not a creative person, just as whoever takes an instrument and plays it without prior knowledge is not a musician. Creativity is a very practical process. 

There are many false notions about creativity. One of them is that everything is based on letting go, that being creative is doing whatever comes to mind. However, the English educator defines creativity as the process of having original ideas that add value.

“To be creative you have to do something, and this means that you have to work with something. To be creative, you have to be able, over time, to control the materials you work with, to obtain the effects that interest you and follow the path that you set yourself ”.

Part of being creative has to do with hypothesizing, testing things, sketching, exploring possibilities – and the second part is being critical, making judgments about the results, and asking questions like: does it work? Is it what you were looking for?

To do this, you must raise children who question themselves, who are capable of objectively criticizing themselves and being optimistic. Scientists, for example, are very objective people, very practical, they are people who are capable of accepting that the method they are using to develop their idea does not work and even so, after having tried 99 methods, they continue to believe that their idea is good. Scientists do not believe that failure is a failure, on the contrary they believe that they are finding solutions. I wish we were all like that! Prepare your children to make mistakes and teach them to learn from their mistakes.

Being creative, or creating something, is a constant process that consists of shaping it, shaping the idea and, as soon as you understand that being creative is a material process for which you have to acquire skill and practice, you can teach it to your children.