“Creativity takes courage.”
– Henri Matisse
“Dance is for everybody. It’s a way to express yourself, to tell a story.”
– Alvin Ailey
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
– Maya Angelou
5-year-old Sage participating in an American Revolution reenactment
Watching Simone Biles, an Olympic gold-medal winning gymnast, doing gravity defying flips and unearthly handling her body brings to mind the need for us all to embrace, enhance, and enjoy our unique talents and gifts, especially children.
As children grow, their unique gifts can become outlets for handling challenges, building their self-esteem, and connecting to their life purposes.
Parents, caregivers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and the community can help guide youth towards their strengths and uniqueness by paying attention and supporting them in their creative play and artistic endeavors. Here are some tips on how to do that:
-
Exploration and imagination: Give children a chance to explore their interests. Encourage them to try new activities in art, music, science experiments, photography, dance, inventing stories, making puppets, writing plays, or building with Legos or blocks.
-
Schedule time for play and exploration: Provide children with time to spend in their unique “sandbox.” If your child loves to paint, read, draw, sing, create music, etc., set aside time for them to spend in their craft or hobby on a regular basis. Schedule the time daily, weekly, or monthly.
-
Invest in your child’s hobbies or interests: This might mean taking them to a dance class, paying for a violin or piano class, or equipping the child with crayons, magazines, and books. For those thrifty caregivers, resources can often be free or done at a minimum cost. Libraries, YouTube videos, classes at community centers, or programs and visits to local museums provide exposure for the creative child while saving money. Take children to theaters, concerts, and cultural events.
Mikayla’s creative play was the inspiration for the book Today My Sister is Getting Married.
- Model creativity: Embracing your own propensity to create and honoring your own talents and gifts is a powerful tool in helping children learn the value of their passions, talents, and unique gifts.
- Provide a creative space: Foster an environment that encourages self-expression. Honor the child’s creativity by providing a reading corner, art area, or creative work space.
- Encourage creative collaboration: Encourage your child to work with others on projects such as school prompts, joining the school theater group, or choir. Parents and siblings can read books together, create art, or do woodworking projects which can become a source of spending time together and connecting as a family.
- Celebrate a child’s creative success through words: Great job! What an awesome piece of art! Wow! Wonderful! Impressive! Of course, what child doesn’t beam when seeing an award they’ve won, a piece of art work they’ve created or a trophy prominently displayed?
Whether your children, grandchildren, or other youth in your life, all young people thrive on having adults who encourage them in their creative pursuits and motivate them to develop their gifts and talents. What young people in your life could you influence in this way? Take a step today to build up a child’s creativity.
Lucille Usher Freeman is the author of Momma Raccoon, her first collaboration with illustrator Gabe Salazar, who was 15 years old at the time.
