Does creativity needs to be nurtured in our child? Why? What is creativity? Most people thinks that creativity is all about art and craft. This is not true! Art and craft are just part of many tools that are used to nurture our child’s creativity.

Creativity is actually a mental processes that involve thinking and producing of new ideas. We are all naturally creative, but if we do not nurture our creativity, it will fade away as we grow. Creativity is just like exercise. If we do not exercise regularly, we find our body parts become inflexible and our stamina become lower. Therefore, creativity is a skill that requires practice to develop. Why we need to develop creativity within us?

Creativity enable us to become more adaptable and flexible in our thinking. Without creativity, we tend to be rigid in whatever we do. For instance, a child saw her mother folded the table napkin in rectangle shape all the time. She was not taught of and exposed to other ways of folding. Therefore, she has no ideas that she can fold the napkin in other shapes such as triangle, flower, fan etc. Her creativity is not being developed since young. As we grow older, we use a lot of creativity in our job or businesses. We need creative ideas to help promote a new product in order to increase sales volume and profits for example. We can’t separate our daily life from creativity. We become more competitive in the real world if we are more creative. A teacher who is creative is able to attract and increase children’s interest in learning as her teaching is fun and interesting.

A creative child is able to rearrange his past experiences to put them together to make new ideas using his imagination. Children who involve in pretend play or imaginative play show that they are transforming simple objects into favorite toys using their imagination. For instance, a child rolls a paper and pretends it is a caterpillar. This is called divergent thinking! A divergent thinker is creative enough to gather many different ideas and organize them into a single interesting idea. It is also essential for problem solving. A creative child is able to look for different ways to solve a problem. Therefore, he is more independent and confident.

Guidelines for nurturing our child’s creativity:

• provide an environment that allows the child to play and explore freely and with encouragement
• allow and accept the child making mistakes
• prepare different choices of materials such as papers, crayons, color pencils, water color and paint brushes, buttons, stones, beads, shells, play dough, clay etc. to allow the child to select, organize, sort and arrange them
• do not judge a child’s unusual thinking, instead we should respect the child’s effort. Allow the child to have both freedom and responsibility to deal with the consequences of their thinking
• allow a child to explore all possibilities with extended and unhurried time
• use questions to lead a child to extend his thinking
• expose our child to a diversity of cultures, experiences, people and ways of thinking. This will enable our child to see that there are different ways to think about a problem

I met a caregiver in a nursery years ago. She was looking after a small group of 3 years old children in a room. One boy was coloring a picture of a man. He used red color pencil to color on the face. The caregiver shouted at him, “Why do you use red color? Is your face red? Use orange for the face!”. The boy was shocked and stopped coloring. If your child is doing the same thing, ask the child calmly why is he choosing the particular color. Listen to him. You might be surprised that to hear his side of the story and proud of his observation and his imagination. If we are able to nurture our child’s creativity, we are developing a future generation of creative writers, readers and learners.