Children Sharing Creativity

Creating from Passion

One day during a swirling nor’easter snowstorm in Massachusetts, several children were playing outside their preschool, creating what the teachers thought was going to be a wide and very thin snowman. The children patted the snow together while they jumped up and down with laughter, taking breaks by running around it. One child seemed to be the leader and added direction to the event. He said, “Okay, over here, we need more snow! Okay, Jimmy find the sticks! Lucy, find the bark for the eyes!” Light snow was falling as they finished up their creative project. They were thrilled.

The teacher said, “Okay, let’s get a hat for his head and some bark for his buttons!”

The children all turned at once and stopped their snow building. The leader child said to the teacher, “It’s not a snowman. It’s a snow horse! We need sticks for the reins and bark for the nose and his eyes! We need some leaves to make the saddle! Then we can ride it!” The children continued to run around their horse until they finished their work.

We love this story because it shows how children can harness their creativity: they have their own ideas about their world and know what it takes to create whatever they desire. Often as teachers and parents, we forget to allow children to be creative. Yet access to creativity and the ability to express ideas in new and different ways is at the core of what it means to be successful.

Allowing Children to Be Creative

Creativity encompasses sensitivity, fluency, flexibility, originality, elaboration, risk taking, and, of course, imagination. Children who are creative not only come up with new questions; they come up with the answers. What’s more, their unique ideas motivate them to finish any task that helps them solve a problem.

Curious and creative children are successful because they are willing to risk failing at their own tasks so they can create what they imagine to be the best in their mind. If they enjoy ice cream, they may want to make their own version of ice cream, real or pretend. Even if their experiment doesn’t work well, they want to try it. And they will persist until they get a chance to make that ice cream. Many educators and researchers say that this motivation to create something and finish it is more important than intelligence when it comes to early childhood success.

Creativity and the Brain

The brain is not a linear, orderly, predictable system.2 Rather, it’s dynamic and subject to frequent change. A child’s brain is processing information constantly about what he sees, how he feels, what he must organize, how he must inhibit certain responses, how he controls his emotions, how he uses language to express his ideas, and how he tells a story or answers a question. And each person’s brain is doing this in a completely unique way through its system of attention and filtering. People file important things away as memories; but others see the same information as extraneous, and they quickly forget it. These decisions, often made on a millisecond timescale, are what make each of us unique and may influence our capacity for creativity.

This filtering process is how the brain creates distinct and novel neuronal connections that are forming the pathways. At the same time, the brain is functioning to monitor more basic body functions and movements. Motor skills, auditory processing, visual input, and other sensory activity are all organized and regulated with individual differences. This is what makes some of us faster than others, but it also influences our sensitivity to the world around us.

The question now is how a brain organizes itself to be more, or less, creative. The latest research confirms that sometimes both sides of the brain are involved in many human activities. Researchers originally thought that the left side of the brain is activated when using language, and that it processes information in a logical and sequential order. The right side was considered to be more visual, processing information intuitively, holistically, and randomly. Now when neuroscientists map language activity, we can see that both sides of the brain are activated.

Scientists thus far have only hunches as to where true creativity comes from. Many artists talk about finding themselves in a zone of creativity that for them is easy to harness but more difficult to repeat on demand.

What we can quantify is the time we allot children to be creative. We can provide the right physical tools for creativity, as well as the emotional support they need. Children must be given the opportunity to be curious and the chance to make mistakes without retribution so that they can feel comfortable enough to take risks that will lead to new ideas, art, or friendships. When children know that they are safe to create something and will not be criticized for making “mistakes,” they will be eager to try new things and learn new skills.