Go Draw, You Little Boogers: Instilling Creativity In Your Children
Parenting in a distracted, always connected world
Of all the things available to us in the world to offset our stress — be it: to numb, distract, or mend — a napkin or a sheet of paper and an ink pen has always proven my greatest ally over the years. As a parent, it’s my duty to instill this understanding of creativity into my children.
“I’m bored”
Whenever my kids tell me they’re bored, I say, “Great. Boredom begets a vibrant imagination. Go draw or write or bang on the drums Santa brought you for Christmas — close the door first.”
First they ask me what beget means. Then, after a touch of moaning and groaning, two things happen:
- My kids go outside and create some new adventure or game out of thin air
- They go to their rooms and create something that no one on Earth has ever created before
Uniquely you
Of the latter, I make sure my children understand this: what you just created has never been created before. Even if they replicate their favorite superhero or cartoon character in their sketchbook, no one has drawn the lines the exact same way they have drawn the lines. There is no replica. No duplicate.
That’s the beauty of creativity.
I asked my daughter what it means to be creative and how it makes her feel. Her response was simple, as it should be at her age:
It makes me feel like an artist. It does something to my brain I can’t explain.
Disconnect the connection to connect
In a lot of ways our house is set up like the 1980s and early 90s when distractions were minimal from a technology standpoint.
I’m no Luddite.
We have the Internet.
We stream family movies.
There’s nothing wrong with either. Movies can inspire. I still hop on my bike and go in search of pirate’s treasure after watching The Goonies. The Internet has its place and can be used for research, connection, and exploration. If not for the Internet, I wouldn’t be able to publish this.
But I can shut-off Wifi with the click of a button. As a parent living in a distracted world, I’ve found Google Wifi to be a godsend. The parental controls couldn’t be easier.
When you give technology supplemental value, it enhances your life. When technology is at the forefront of your life, it takes away. Our brains and bodies are not biologically wired to sit and stare at a screen for hours piled upon hours a day.
Trade the tablet for a sketchpad or notebook
In “Only Three Fingers Write, but the Whole Brain Works," authors Audrey L.H. van der Meer and F.R. (Ruud) van der Weel found that when the participants studied drew by hand direct electrophysiological evidence activated larger networks in the brain than when typing.
Consider the implications. As a parent of school-aged children, the decline in hand-to-paper expression is concerning. Forget how well a kid writes by hand and consider instead how the child learns by writing by hand as opposed to inputting the same information on a screen.
This includes even math, a subject being taught and tested on via a screen which is perplexing to me as an atypical learner myself. I need paper to do math. Solving a math problem on a screen is the equivalent of solving it inside my head, which ain’t happening captain.
In “Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents," authors Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell concluded that the more screen time for children ages 2–17 the lower their well-being and that heavy users showed:
- less curiosity,
- less self-control, and
- less emotional stability.
And that evidence of anxiety or depression was double that of low screen time users or non-users.
As a parent of two children, this isn’t particularly surprising. Like many parents, we purchased a tablet for our children, initially as a way for them to read age-appropriate e-books and play the occasional game.
But the quick tempers and subsequent moods swings immediately after turning in their devices became too much to bear.
Whether causation or correlation at the time, we didn’t know. But what we did come to learn was that there was something awry going on with the moods of our children when screens were present and in the hour after they were put away.
Sunk costs are hard to swallow: we’d bought a tablet for each of our children and a recurring monthly subscription for the e-books and games. But the proof was in the pudding.
We canceled the subscription, traded in the tablets for some old-school, wireless sketchbooks and notebooks — no Wifi needed — and took a trip to the local library where the kids applied for their own library cards.
Remove distractions and imaginations bloom
Since shifting gears on widely available, new technology, my wife and I have watched our children grow and expand their imaginations in a way that seemed unfathomable when the glowing blue light of screens was present.
During a recent outing to a farmer’s co-op, my kids pooled their money together to purchase a bundle of rope. Once home, they built a makeshift swing in our front yard using the newly acquired rope and scrap boards from my workshop.
From there:
- A fairy house sprang up at the base of the tree,
- The launch of a temporary tattoo parlor at the top of our driveway,
- An impromptu friendship bracelet making workshop,
- Homemade board games on poster board, which were quite impressive I might add, and
- Bike rides down nature trails.
In a world where distraction reigns supreme and attention is a commodity, instill creativity in your children. As they grow older, they may come to find that the tiny napkin at the restaurant or the single sheet of paper on their desk is a refuge — one that doesn’t numb or distract, but mend, heal, and soothe.
