How Do You Teach Your Child to Be Creative?

Modern sciences tells us that to a significant degree,  we wire our own brains. So how does the brain get wired for creativity? Why are some people more creative than others? Can we teach creativity?

To the latter two questions, some people will always be "more" than others—let's not put our attention there—and, contrary to what many experts believe, creativity cannot be taught. 

Creativity is not a skill that someone can teach us, such as we might learn critical thinking skills from a logic teacher or how to play the piano from a piano teacher, because creativity is more like curiosity. 

We can't teach a child to be curious because children are born curious, but we can teach a child not to be curious. We do this very successfully in school where children learn to curb their questions or stop asking them at all.

And what a tragedy because curiosity is at the root of creativity and creativity is at the root of genius. 

Do you ever wonder what great contributions to the world and to humanity have we missed because of our factory school model? 

“I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers. ”

— John D. Rockefeller

According to the late scientist, George Land, we can also teach children not to be creative, yet, without creativity, there is no genius.

Creative people are curious about the external world, the internal world, and the world of possibility. Creative people connect unrelated ideas to form an original idea. They find solutions to problems that others can't see. They imagine what could be and bring it to life. 

They are the creators. 

But curiosity can’t be all a child needs because all healthy children are born curious. Enter George Land, who did a creativity study for NASA, and what came out of that study was the realization that 98% of children have imaginations that operate in the zone of genius, until they go to school.

“I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”

— John Taylor Gatto

But that study was conducted in the 1968. A lot has changed since then, and, besides the problem of school, there are a lot of other factors contributing to dull minds. 

So how do we get it right today? Consider that your child is like a garden you want to grow, so you have fresh vegetables, fruits, and flowers. 

You have cleared the ground, prepared the soil, created rows, and planted seeds according to kind.

But that's not all that’s required of you to produce a vibrant, healthy garden. You have to water the plants, make sure they get the right amount of sunshine, and sometimes shade, and make sure the soil has the right combination of minerals to nurture the plant. 

Children, like plants, also need the right kind of environment in order for their creativity to bloom and blossom. Let's look at a few of the many ways in which you can adjust your child's environment to help nurture his creativity. 

1. BE THERE

Science tells us that stress kills creativity. I know this is true, and I'm sure you do too. It's difficult to be creative when we have a lot of stress because our energy goes towards dealing with overwhelming challenges in order to meet our basic needs and responsibilities. What time is there left for being creative?

Children also experience stress. It's critical to their neurological and emotional development  that they feel safe, loved, and cared for. Children need a home environment that meets these needs, which means that they also need us. 

The worst environment for a young child is daycare, preschool, kindergarten, first grade, and even second grade, according to an analysis of approximately 8000 early childhood studies conducted by Dr. Raymond Moore in the 1970s. 

One of the many things he discovered is that if children are kept out of school until they are about age ten, they will experience better mental and emotional health. Let me take the liberty of adding that common sense dictates they will be more creative too. 

2. FREE TO ROAM

 Unstructured play is critical for raising a child who is creative. Play-based programs are not bad but they are not beneficial either, unless you need a break. And, let's be honest, it isn't easy raising children without extended family help. Some of us need more breaks than others, and that's okay.

Structured play found in programs deprives children of the kind of play that comes from within, which is the best kind for developing creativity.  As long as you aren't about to pull your hair out, I'd opt for unstructured play over play programs.

Play serves many purposes, all of which are fundamental to the healthy development of a child, and one of them is developing the imagination which make-believe play nurtures.

For example, a child can turn a box into a castle and he will see a castle, he won't see a box. The last thing we want to do is to tell him to "put the box away!" Children encounter problems in their free play which they need to solve. All problems require creative solutions to solve them.

3. STAY OUT OF THE WAY

A child who can help himself should always be encouraged to help himself. Say your child decides that he wants to draw a bird, but every time he draws the bird he messes up the bird's beak. Now he whines from frustration. You don't want to step in and help him. 

Let him learn to work through his frustration now rather than getting into the habit of falling apart when things don't go the way he wants them too. 

“Parents should not agonize over anything a child does or fails to do if the child is perfectly capable of agonizing over it himself.”

— John Rosemond, Parenting Guru

Habits like "easy-to-get-frustrated" are not easy to break as adults, and they will get in the way of your child's ability to function in a healthy, productive way as an adult. 

Tough love means being willing to let our children experience uncomfortable emotions, so they learn to accept them as part of life's journey without losing hope and giving up too soon. How else will they be able to accomplish anything? 

4. Rhymes, Rhymes, and More Rhymes

Read rhymes to your children and play rhyming games with them to build their creativity muscle. You say a word or sentence and they have to find a word or sentence that it rhymes with. 

Fairy tales will also stimulate a child's imagination, especially if the book contains few to no illustrations.

Children love picture books, and these kind of books have their place, but without the pictures, children use their imaginations to conjure up the scene in their mind. This also makes reading more enjoyable for them. 

Have you ever read a book and then watched the film it was based on? There is nothing worse than having a perfectly imagined character in your mind, only to have Hollywood ruin it for you. After that, you will always see the Hollywood actor, never your original creation. 

5. A NO-BRAINER

If you've been reading my weekly  blog posts, you know what I am going to say next don't you?

Absolutely no screens for your budding genius! Nothing will kill a child's memory, imagination, or curiosity faster than screen use. 

The bad news is that if all of their friends are using screens, you may not want to become the "problem" parent. I don't recommend it because the screen becomes the forbidden apple, and your kids will flock to them as soon as they get the chance. 

When I was young, my mother threw out all of the white sugar in the house. I used to go to my best friend's horse and eat sugar from the sugar bowl. You don't want your children doing this with screens.

The good news is that if you are able to recruit other parents  or find parents whose children are screen-free, then your children will think a screen-free childhood is what's normal. Sadly, it isn't, but they don't need to know this right now. 

Did you know that there are many young adults now who are disappointed with their parents for letting them have screens and phones when they were younger?

Please, please, please don't let your child be one of them!

If you follow the guidelines here, your children will be developmentally ahead of most of their peers who are in school and using screens, and they'll be well on their way to living a more productive and enriching life.

Don’t miss your free download:

10 Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read

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About Elizabeth Y. Hanson

Developing a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a “whole” child, based on tradition and modern research, Liz devotes her time to helping parents to get it right.

Liz is a homeschooling thought-leader, as well as the creator of three unique online courses, Raise Your Child Well: Preserving Your Child's Natural Genius by Laying a Solid Foundation During the First Seven Years; the Smart Homeschooler Academy, educating children who are brilliant, happy, and well-socialized; and How to Teach Your Child to Read and Raise a Child Who Loves to Read.

As an Educator, Homeschool Emerita, Writer, and Love and Leadership Certified Parenting Coach, Liz has 23 years of experience guiding parents through the amazing journey of raising and educating their children.

Liz is available for one-on-one consultations as needed.

"I know Elizabeth Y. Hanson as a remarkably intelligent, highly sensitive woman with a moral nature and deep insight into differences between schooling and education. Elizabeth's mastery of current educational difficulties is a testimony to her comprehensive understanding of the competing worlds of schooling and education. She has a good heart and a good head. What more can I say?”

—John Taylor Gatto Distinguished educator, public speaker, and best-selling author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. For a copy of The Short Angry History of Compulsory Schooling, click here.

Don't Teach Your Children About Diversity!→

One of the beauties of homeschooling is that we can protect our children from political agendas that don't serve mankind, and the diversity issue may be one of them.

It mirrors the old military strategy of Julius Caesar's, "divide and conquer."

And Julius Caesar was no dummy.

So why is diversity the wrong conversation to have with your children? The best illustration for arguing against a topic which has divided so many of us is the example of my mother. 

My mother was different from the social-justice warriors you hear about today. An original warrior, she never preached to anyone, she wasn't spouting angry rhetoric about perceived wrongs, she never felt better than you or me because of the services she did; she just helped where she saw that people needed help.

When I was a young child, my mother was very active in the Civil Rights Movement, a violent and bloody time in America. Despite the dangers, she relentlessly marched with the oppressed in their struggle for equality, more worried about their safety than she was her own.

The World Encyclopedia even included a picture of her and my sister Kathleen, who had both flown across the country to demonstrate with hundreds of other people in the historic march on Selma, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1965.

My mother is on the left, my sister is holding the sign.

As I became a young woman, my mother, who was now middle-aged, served on the board for the homeless people where she listened to their stories, helped them get shelter, and assisted people in getting back on their feet.

She said to me once that homeless people weren't the bums others thought they were; they were usually people who'd had some hardship in life with no one to fall back on for support, and they'd ended up on the streets. 

Her heart always went out to the underserved amongst us.

When I hit my middle-ages, my mother, who was now an old woman, served as a volunteer teaching the Hispanic community English. She did that until she became ill at the age of ninety. 

To my mother, each life mattered because each life contained a human heart and that human heart possessed inherent dignity and worth. That was the ideal my mother embodied and lived by.

Color, religion, race; those weren't labels she understood.

She recognized that we all suffer the loss of loved ones, we all worry about our children, most of us struggle with our siblings, some of us wonder if God exists and many of us question why so much killing and suffering happens in the name of religion.  

There’s more sameness in us than there is difference.

The Diversity Rhetoric Questioned

Some years back, after my mother passed away, I had a series of experiences which led me to question the new diversity rhetoric that had emerged, such as the time I was asked to give a talk on education to a group of mothers from varying backgrounds. 

In defense of diversity, a woman of color felt it her duty to ask me why I only promoted books written by white people. Well, I don't, I explained. I promote books for the quality of the writing and content, not because of the skin color of the author. 

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. ”

— Rumi

The fact is that there are only six canons of great literature in the world and one of them belongs to the West.

I had wanted to introduce these women to our body of great books for children—not all of whom were written by white people—but this particular mom could only see the color of my skin and what she thought was the color of the authors' skin. 

Another experience was with a friend who espoused diversity ideals. When Trump became president, this particular friend of mine from an Eastern country grew livid and said to me,  "The white people have shown their true colors!" 

I had never seen my friend in terms of her skin color, yet she had just revealed that that was exactly how she saw me. I was her "white" friend and now my people had shown their true colors. 

But the experience that took the cake was when an academic corrected me after I objected to the racism of a certain "movement"  which  was in vogue at the time. 

She informed me that I could not accuse other people of being racist because I was white and only white people were racist. Her lack of logical reasoning dumbfounded me.

When you have lived in many different countries, as I have, you learn about  different cultures and different ways of viewing the world. I can tell you first-hand that I have never met a people who did not think they were better than another people.

In every country I’ve lived in, there’s always been the majority group who believed they were better than the minority group or they were better than the people of a neighboring country.

And then there's the individuals; us. Have you ever known an individual who did not express a judgement on another individual, either verbally or by inference?

We expose our petty, self-righteous arrogance every day; she gossips too much, he's too ambitious, he's too materialistic, she's too bossy. 

Whatever they is, we is above it, right?

“We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”

— Rudyard Kipling

We all contain seeds of the virtues in our hearts such as compassion, generosity, temperance.

However, our hearts also contain seeds of the vices, such as envy, anger, greed.

But the crowning vice is arrogance, and some of us cultivate the roots of it more than we like to admit, even to ourselves.

Yet, what is racism, if not arrogance?

The Danger of the Group

There are a lot of diverse groups in America and they largely stick to their own kind. Maybe it's a kind of religion; or a kind of race, or a kind of political ideology, but "groups" tend to keep to their own, which makes sense because, after all, they are groups.

But there is something dangerous about  a clustering of kind when we base our identity on the "group" we belong to and see people outside of the "group" as the "other."

Barbara Coloroso, a parenting expert who had studied the genocide in Rwanda, said that the seeds of  genocide take root when we objectify a group of people as "other."

Rather than see them as fellow human beings traveling with us through the journey of life, we see them as "different" from us. 

And that's the crux of the matter. When we teach about diversity, we are teaching about differences, we are teaching about the "other."

If we allow our identity to be based on the identity of a particular  group  instead of our shared humanity, we lose sight of the inward bonds of our collective hearts. 

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

— Mother Teresa

It's not that we can't be a member in a group, but let's not be of the group. And if we have to identify with a group, then let's identify with the group of human beings who shed tears of joy and sorrow for all the same things.

That was the group to which my mother belonged.

Instead of teaching our children about our differences, I'm suggesting we raise our children to focus on our samenesses.

Genocide is genocide; it doesn't matter who is committing it or who it's being committed against. 

When it comes to the innocent slaughter of women and children; regardless of their race, religion, or color, who are we being if we don't stand on the side of mercy?

Who are we when we raise our children to think in terms of "otherness" instead of the common bond of the human heart?

When we dismiss a child's book, not on whether or not the book is worth reading, but because of the skin color of the authors, haven't we ourselves nurtured the seed of genocide?

Upcoming FREE Masterclass! Discover 3 Homeschooling Mistakes No One Tells You About
with Liz Hanson

Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.

When you join the Smart Homeschooler Academy online course for parents, Liz will share her 6-step framework, so you can raise children of higher intelligence, critical thinking, and of good character.

As a homeschooler, you will never have to worry about failing your children, because working with Liz, you will feel confident, calm, and motivated; as she guides you to train your children’s minds and nurture their characters.

Teach your child to read before sending him to school! Learn more about Elizabeth's unique course, How to Teach Your Child to Read and Raise a Child Who Loves to Read.

For parents of children under age seven who would like to prepare their child for social and academic success, please begin with Elizabeth’s singular online course, Raise Your Child to Thrive in Life and Excel in Learning.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is a homeschooling thought-leader and the founder of Smart Homeschooler.

As an Educator, Homeschool Emerita, Writer, and Love and Leadership Certified Parenting Coach, she has 21+ years of experience working in education.

Developing a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child, based on tradition and modern research, and she devotes her time to helping parents to get it right.

Elizabeth is available for one-on-one consultations as needed.

"I know Elizabeth Y. Hanson as a remarkably intelligent, highly sensitive woman with a moral nature and deep insight into differences between schooling and education. Elizabeth's mastery of current educational difficulties is a testimony to her comprehensive understanding of the competing worlds of schooling and education. She has a good heart and a good head. What more can I say?”

—John Taylor Gatto Distinguished educator, public speaker, and best-selling author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Don't Homeschool If Your Children Have This One Bad Habit!→

The most frequent complaint I get from homeschooling moms is that their children don't listen to them. It's more than just a complaint  because  for a homeschooling mom, not listening is a serious issue.

Children who don't listen, won't obey and children who don't obey, won't get their work done. Which means that you, the homeschooling parent, will struggle  to do your job well. 

“The essence of successful discipline is not technique; rather, it is self-confidence.”

— John Rosemond, author, A Family of Value

However, I am not suggesting that you put your children into school; but only to train them to listen before you continue homeschooling. After all, the skill of listening is a vital skill and one children must be taught.

An Effective Approach

The most effective approach would be to stop homeschooling for a short period until you get your relationship back on course with your children. 

The reason for this is because the frustration everyone is feeling from the tug of war around studying is probably causing a lot of tension, and your children may develop a negative association with homeschooling if it continues. 

Once your children decide that homeschooling is no fun, instead of one problem, you’ve now got two. So a break is the best strategy for this situation.

But rather than announce you are putting homeschooling on hold until they learn to obey,  announce that next week will be a homeschool break week. You don't need to offer any reason other than, "Because I said so!". 

The Crux of the Matter

Now, you can focus on the issue which, at the core, is a problem of disrespect. Like most parents in the West, your children are not showing you the respect you deserve. 

It's a societal problem for various reasons including, but not limited to, the negative influences on children via multi-media and technology, as well as the push for modern parenting practices that sound great in theory but haven’t worked. 

While there are multiple strategies that should be employed in your efforts to correct your relationship with your children, we'll focus on the primary tactic of assuming the role of leadership.

As two captains will sink a ship, you and your spouse will have to show up as one. In other words, you have one voice. What one says, the other supports, at least in front of the children. Any disagreements you have regarding your children, must be discussed privately.

Successful Parenting Traits

It's critical to understand the traits of successful parents, so you can learn to imitate them until they become your traits, too.

Successful parenting leadership…

• They are decisive

• They communicate clear expectations

• They hold their children accountable

• They assume authority (not to be confused with "authoritarian")

• They set clear boundaries

• They give their children age-appropriate responsibilities

• They do not bend down to their children's level; they let their children look up to them

If this list sounds too authoritarian, it may be in comparison to the modern advice you've probably been given. 

The question to ask yourself is, how's that working?

Your children need to see you as the authority, someone worthy of respect, someone they can trust to keep their word, and a role model they can emulate.

You want to be a good influence for your children, so you can guide them towards developing good character and excelling in your homeschool. Like us, they won't emulate someone they do not respect. 

“The more attention you pay to your child, the less attention he will pay to you.”

— John Rosemond

Once you have successfully established your boundaries by assuming the role of leader, your children will listen and obey you and homeschooling will be more fun and fruitful. 

Effective parenting leadership must include unconditional  love, but I know you have that part covered. 

Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.

When you join the Smart Homeschooler Academy online course for parents, Liz will share her 6-step framework, so you can raise children of higher intelligence, critical thinking, and of good character.

As a homeschooler, you will never have to worry about failing your children, because working with Liz, you will feel confident, calm, and motivated; as she guides you to train your children’s minds and nurture their characters.

Teach your child to read before sending him to school! Learn more about Elizabeth's unique course, How to Teach Your Child to Read and Raise a Child Who Loves to Read.

For parents of children under age seven who would like to prepare their child for social and academic success, please begin with Elizabeth’s singular online course, Raise Your Child to Thrive in Life and Excel in Learning.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is a homeschooling thought-leader and the founder of Smart Homeschooler.

As an Educator, Homeschool Emerita, Writer, and Love and Leadership Certified Parenting Coach, she has 21+ years of experience working in education.

Developing a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child, based on tradition and modern research, and she devotes her time to helping parents to get it right.

Elizabeth is available for one-on-one consultations as needed.

"I know Elizabeth Y. Hanson as a remarkably intelligent, highly sensitive woman with a moral nature and deep insight into differences between schooling and education. Elizabeth's mastery of current educational difficulties is a testimony to her comprehensive understanding of the competing worlds of schooling and education. She has a good heart and a good head. What more can I say?”

—John Taylor Gatto Distinguished educator, public speaker, and best-selling author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling