DORÉ

I was raised in a house with a parent who was passionate about topics related to childhood education and was a childhood educator herself who started off teaching and then became a strong advocate for children and childhood education.

Dewey was mentioned from time-to-time, but Froebel, the 19th century childhood educator really set the tone of the conversation. Froebel created the concept of Kindergarten as a pre-cursor to more structured schooling based on play. Froebel was also a big believer in nurturing the individual interests and abilities of children as opposed to creating conformity. That didn’t necessarily mean that there wasn’t structure in the classroom, it just meant that children weren’t all expected to be good at the same things or to learn the same things. As a result, we grew up playing in chemistry labs (H2SO4 locked safely away!) and going crazy with everyhing from music to art to building model train sets.

Kids in urban environments today have a lot less freedom to explore than they did even a few decades ago and the degree of structure seems to be increasingly putting a lot of pressure on them. There have been articles in magazines about high profile suicides in places like Palo Alto high schools because the pressure in schools is so intense and the age at which the intensity and competition starts gets younger and younger all the time. It seems to be symptomatic of the way life is evolving generally in developed countries.

Well… To me this seems quite natural. But then again, I was raised that way myself. My mother is an artist, and I became an artist aswell. The thing is, if you go down the “raise a creative child”-path, there are no guarantee that your child will be successful and change the world in a revolutionary way. I haven’t. And I’m pretty sure I won’t. Because I’m not in to that at all. Money, fame, succes or even attention just isn’t my bag. And because I was raised to make my own choices and follow my curiosity, I’m now extremely anonymous with a minor salary and very satisfied. I just don’t want to live by norms and rules that doesn’t make sense to me. I want to live in a way that makes me happy. That said, I think every child should have the right and the opportunity to make their own choices just like I have. The world would be a more humane place if they did. But I’m pretty sure a lot of parents still care more about their kids being successful, wealthy or famous.
A fun side note is that the punk rock movement and DIY has a lot of the creative stuff going on, but isn’t very popular amongst parents either. Or in the world at large (more than perhaps as a trend in fashion, when the squares want to show off their wilder side). Seriously though, if you want to raise a creative child: raise a punk rocker.

Tara, je pense pas qu’il faille comprendre ‘créatif’ dans le sens purement artistique mais plutôt dans le sens expérimental, sortir des sentiers battus, trouver ses propres chemins, décider soi-même de la manière dont on veut / peut arriver à un résultat.
J’ai deux enfants (4 ans et demi /1 an et demi) et à la maison on est très pédagogie Montessori. Je pense que tout le système éducatif est à revoir (en France en tout cas), le jour où nos gouvernants comprendront que les enfants d’aujourd’hui sont les adultes de demain, on ira plus loin et on vivra en paix. L’éducation est un sujet qui me passionne depuis que j’ai des enfants mais surtout depuis que mon fils est entré à l’école, je pense même à en faire mon métier ou me lancer en politique pour faire bouger les choses, tant c’est frustrant de voir ses enfants mis dans des catégories, contraints d’avancer dans le même sens que tous les autres, au même rythme, avec une pensée unique…

As the mother of a five-year old girl, I do not really think of how to make my daughter creative, or an athlete, or a scientist, or a writer, or… As a matter of fact she wants to become a florist and a street musician on her free time (she thought it was kind of cool when we visited New Orleans last year!). Our main goal is to give her tools to become a responsible and happy adult: whatever she does, as long as she enjoys it and does not hurt herself or others with it, we will support her.

My father used to say when I was a kid (and complaining to have nothing to do): “it is very healthy to be bored from time to time”. I tell my daughter the same (and get from her the same look I probably had thirty years ago). Nowadays we tend to think “free” time has to be filled with activities and the little idle minutes we have in between are occupied with a flow of information coming from our screens. Creativity comes also from idleness. Concretely, it means that our daughter has very limited (and entirely supervised) access to screens (only 3 hours of TV per week), and a reasonable amount of “empty” time at home during the week (although it tends to get busier and busier). She has plenty of toys that she mixes as much as she wants (and deviates from their original use too), stationery and material at disposal for her scrapbooking, pens and paper, books (she does not read but remember some of the stories we read her – or create new – and tell them out loud while looking at the pictures), music, costumes, pieces of fabric and jewelry to create shows with her friends… I have noticed that when she is bored, she might complain for max 20 min but finds herself an activity that will keep her much occupied eventually… even if it means cutting pieces of hair from her barbie to mix them with watercolour and leaves from our pot plants to create a magical potion (and making a mess in the kitchen with that).

Creativity is also something you can enjoy (and “train” if I may) with them, in many small and different ways, far from institutions. It is finding good places where to hide in a new park. It is dancing in the living-room on “Happy” from Pharrell Williams. Collecting funny stuffs from walks (I have a bowl full of her “treasures” – shells, pinecones, chestnuts and stones – on our coffee table). Asking “what kind of story does this music inspire you?” when listening to classical music (she is much better than me). Creating new lyrics for well-known children songs (my husband is a blast with his parodies of “let it go”). And sharing our interests with her, travelling, swimming, skiing, good food, music, etc.

We have plenty of time to see what she finally likes more or less, on what she eventually puts her mind. And there is no need to make her feel she needs to choose something “for good”. We live in a world where it is possible and more and more common to change career, to start something entirely new past your forties… so I ask: why the pressure?

This is dead on true. I have 8 children from age 1 to 16. I have discovered this along the way. We underestimate our children beyond words. They are mini geniuses that often get taught to limit their thinking and the genius hides within and sometimes never gets revealed. Sad! I feel so thankful to have discovered this. It fun to watch these little people discover and establish their own brilliant understandings. They have taught me so much. Motherhood is the best education of human spirit! ????

As a mother of three very creative daughters and a creative myself, I tend to agree with Adam Grant’s philosophy of ‘backing off’. Something amazing happens when you give a child room to explore and make mistakes. They develop the courage and the conviction to express exactly what’s on their mind and create art in the many forms they see fit. Be it writing, painting, dancing, acting or simply living their truth-whatever that may be- the freedom to be yourself is invaluable and sets the stage for the rest of your life. That said, while each of my girls are currently creative and relish the freedoms they’re allotted, they also respond favorably to structure. As a parent, I feel my job is to offer love, support, and encouragement no matter what while at the same time provide my girls with a set of comfortable yet expandable parameters in which to thrive.

Furthermore, raising a child is extremely personal and what I know for sure is no one can predict the future. I’m simply happy to be raising my daughters. No matter the outcome.

http://brooklynchateau.blogspot.com/

I totally agree with you, especially the part about “competition is the worst thing for children.”

Je suis d’accord il fat laisser les enfants exprimer leur crétaivité en les laissant libre de faire ce qu’il veulent faire VRAIMENT au lieu de les faire rentrer dans des “cases”.

Vaste sujet…qui m’a surtout interpellée le jour où ma fille est rentrée à l’école et je me suis rendue compte que j’angoissais plus qu’elle!l’idée qu’elle soit formatée, que toute créativité, expression personnelle soit annihilée… Cela résonnait étrangement beaucoup alors même que je n’ai pas le souvenir d’avoir mal vécu ma période scolaire. Mais il y a un TED sur la créativité à l’école d’un prof anglais qui vit à LA qui résume très bien les choses (je ne sais plus son nom…).
Une fois une amie (qui est toujours sur le dos de ses gamins) m’a dit (un brin envieuse): “c’est fou comme ta fille est capable de jouer toute seule!”, ce à quoi j’ai répondu en riant que c’est parce que “je ne m’en occupais pas tout le temps et la laissais dans sa chambre”…en l’écrivant je me rend compte que ça fait mauvaise mère mais finalement, il semblerait qu’elle en ait développée son imagination…

I haven’t thought about this too much (not at all close to having a child) but I probably would lean towards this philosophy. If I could let my child be and express themselves the way they feel, then I would like to :)

http://www.dressupchowdown.com

Wearing different shoes is totally OK! It shows so well how we – grownups – are so stuck in the way we see the world.
You’re right – it hurts no-one. And it IS creative. :)

Check cet article :-)

I think that having a culture where it is ok to make mistakes and experiment and not have perfect results helps encourage creativity. I don’t know about how it is for kids but for me, it actually helps to have some limits with my creative projects. like for example, sometimes I feel refreshed just working in black and white (grey and one color) for graphics. when I don’t have any specifications or parameters for a creative project, then I can get overwhelmed, although it might have to do with tending towards perfectionism. also I take a lot of online courses and I find that it is really important to be able to take good creative critiques and to also be able to give good, constructive creative critiques (it helps you grow in both roles).

also I think it is helpful to have that mind where you can step back and look at a whole thing and then step in and look at a small part of a thing. and to acknowledge that you have more than one try to do something as you wish. I like that process of iteration, variety, and discovery.

I was personally very relieved to read the Grant article in the NYTimes and see that people who are accomplished can be interested in quite a wide variety of fields, even if their career is in a quite different area. I thought I was being crazy or too unfocused. I had a sense that people in my current field of work were totally focused (with masters degrees, phd’s, and working for free on your time off from work without any side hobbies) but personally I also felt that that was a sacrifice from being a whole person.

I believe in all things there need to be a balance.

I myself grew up with a lot of freedom to roam, imagine, day-dream, dress the marmots, build ‘farms’ in the dirt, rearrange my room, draw or play piano for hours on end and…. I loved it!! And I am totally for it!!

But we also had many structured things we had to do as children. Like learning to write, doing arithmetic, making our beds, helping out in the house, playing ball (although it was always a ‘chore’ I had to do with my brother), learning to swim and cycle (even though I dreaded and feared it as a child). These things that I was not naturally inclined to do taught me valuable skills at a very young age. These skills would have been much harder to learn as a teenager or an adult.

When we are little children our brains have this incredible capacity to learn new things and develop skills we don’t naturally have, and that is a big important part of what needs to happen. Forcing me to play ball and cycle and do other coordination type stuff developed my sense of space. Even though I will never be a remotely good tennis player or cyclist, it makes me a capable driver today – a skill that is essential to my quality of life. In comparison my friends that got just as small a helping of the coordination talent as I did, but were aloud to ‘ditch the ball’ if they wanted to, are still struggling to get a licence and are limited in their lives for it. It’s a small thing, but makes quite a difference later in life.

Doing things I was not naturally inclined to in a forced, structured way developed essential skills in me that I today know I would not want to miss out on. It taught me to face and overcome fear at a very young age. Oh, how proud and joyful I felt as a little pre-school girl the first time I calmly swam the length of the swimming pool on my own. From then on, I was freer within myself to take on anything in the rest of my childhood learning that I was curious about, but a little scared to get into. It also taught me how to be patient and tolerate discomfort and discontent with what I am doing in the moment (all that arithmetic :P). And today even though I do what I love for a living and am naturally good at, there is still aspects to it that is not part of my natural strengths. There is aspects to my job that cause me a lot of discontent and discomfort, but I persevere through them for the sake of what I love and in the end makes me feel like a totally free human being.

I am deeply thankful to my parents for allowing me to naturally grow into who I am in the very heart of me. And I am also very thankful to them for teaching me skills that as an adult liberates me to be who I am even more.

Thanks for striking a great balance in my upbringing Mom!!!

although I am not a parent, I think perhaps the trick is that you let your kids find their path. they can be artists, scientists, both, or whatever else. I think the relationships are the key foundation and then things like intelligence and curiosity, you encourage them but basically accept your kids for who they are and where they want to go with it. seems like the hard part is to know where is that balance between guiding them b/c of concern and letting them discover themselves.

My brother and I grew up without a television. We are now 28 and 25 years old, respectively. Although we both remember how as a kid it wasn’t always easy to feel somewhat left out of a culture in which our friends were all part of, we also think not having a television fostered our creativity.

It allowed us to have the time to be bored, and to learn to love spending time alone. These are things that cost a fortune later on. As an adult, there is very little time to be bored, or to learn to enjoy being on our own. We were also sent to a school in which fine arts (music, theater, and visual arts) was added to the traditional curriculum. Today, we both hold professional jobs/studies (him as a website designer/programmer, I as a psychologist-to-be), and we are both very creative in doing so, and have also managed to continue making art in our spare time.

I don’t know if there is a recipe for raising creative children, but I think that as parents, when we have very busy lives in which we follow strict schedules, even if these include ”creative” after-school activities, we may not be giving our children the time required for them to really nurture and express their inner selves.

Nous avons un petit garçon de 7 et demi je ne ai jamais rien imposé car que je pense les enfants sont capables de décider par eux même et cela est important de ne pas imposer toutes sortes d’ activités . Et à la maison il n à jamais été questions de programmer tel ou tel activités pour qu il soit toujours en train de réfléchir ou en activité. Notre petit garçon à appris à jouer seul depuis tout petit dans son parc et maintenant il peut jouer au play mobile se créer des histoires, il a découvert les échecs par le intermédiaire de l école et par lui même il me à demande de faire des cours pour apprendre et maintenant il s éclaté chaque mercredi et vacances. Et les enfants doivent aussi apprendre à s ennuyer cela important aussi pour se construire ! Lorsqu’il est à la maison ses jeux sont très variés conclusion pas besoin de imposer pour que les enfants développent leur connaissance ou leur curiosité car toutu dépend de la éducation et comment nous adultes sommes nous ! Si nous sommes curieux de la vie et ouvert au monde nos enfants seront ouverts sur le monde ! Notre petit garçon sait qu’il y a différentes populations avec des coutumes des religions différentes des nôtres ! Notre petit garçon adore danse la musique nous voudrions qu il prenne des cours mais il n est pas encore prêt à être dirige et lui il veut danser mais des que il aura envie il fera !