Today, raising creative kids won’t happen naturally. It has to be a choice.
In a world in which technology lets us live in other people’s ideas, life in school is increasingly regimented, and the past few years have made it challenging to have new in-person conversations, a decline in creativity is hardly a surprise.
Even so, parents have often failed to fight the changes that most harm their children’s creativity, according to Dr. Leonard Sax, a psychologist.
“American parents have abandoned their authority to an extent greater than any other country,” he said.
You Are Your Child’s Keeper
Screens often seem to be a key factor in the loss of child creativity, according to teachers. But one of the main reasons kids prize screens so highly is that their parents spend so much time online.
According to Sax, kids notice when adults spend all day staring at screens. Often, they feel abandoned by their parents.
Once when Sax was talking to a school assembly about child screen use, a boy asked him if his mom could install a screen time limitation app on her phone.
“He then proceeded to tell the entire middle school how he comes home and wants to talk to his mom. But his mom is scrolling through her Instagram app, giving distracted one-word answers to his questions, not really listening to what her son is saying,” Sax said.
If moms and dads want their kids to be offscreen, they should get offscreen themselves, Sax said.
“Children who spent more than two hours a day on electronic devices scored lower on thinking and language tests. Those with more than seven hours of screen time experienced thinning of the brain’s cortex, which is related to critical thinking and reasoning,” the website said.
The biggest mistake that parents make is believing they can’t set rules for their child’s screen time, Sax said. If parents do a good job with screens, they can teach that virtue to their children.
“You cannot teach your children a virtue which you yourself do not possess. In order to become a better parent, you have to become a better person,” he said.
Kids don’t discover their own solutions if adults solve problems for them, according to Theresa, a New York teacher who grew up in Nigeria.
Let Kids Struggle
“Why would I put effort into anything when I can just go to the store to buy a solution?” she asked.According to Theresa, some of the difficulties of growing up in Nigeria taught her creativity. Her family was very poor, so she and her siblings learned to innovate.
Theresa’s family made their own backpacks. Because they didn’t have a TV, her brother made his own TV signal antenna. Her siblings would build their own toy cars, too. Theresa still uses the sewing skills she learned as a child.
“It made childhood fun. Because it wasn’t just like, ‘You got a brand-new gift.’ It was, ‘I created this with my own hands.'”
Brains Need Bodies
One common problem for kids who spend too much time online is that they have trouble connecting with nature and their bodies, according to Page Park, a schoolteacher who also teaches yoga.“If they get frustrated with something, they don’t know how to deal with that within their body,” she said.
Living in a physical world lets kids create in ways that don’t come from templates, according to Olivia Grace, a psychologist at The Mindful Gamer.
In games or online, kids can be creative, although they often use software, rules, and systems that have been created by someone else.
“An addiction to video games can contribute to this effect as children spend more time immersed in fantasy worlds developed by game designers as opposed to something conjured by their own imagination,” she said.
In the real world, children must make their own fantasies. The practice strengthens their creativity, Grace said.
Park said that when extremely online kids learn to connect with their bodies through yoga, they often stop feeling stressed. When kids recognize and manage their bodily feelings of anxiety, they can reach a place of mental stability.
In one case, an autistic boy was going to mental health therapy. But taking yoga lessons helped him so much with stress relief and with feeling connected to his body that it replaced his therapy.
“His mom said that it has replaced any sort of counseling or mental health therapy that he might need, because of that mind-body connection,” Park said.
Give Them Dreams
Americans today tend to undervalue sleep. Kids 6 to 12 years old need nine to 12 hours of sleep each night to function well. Teens need eight to 10 hours of sleep per night.But about six out of 10 middle-schoolers and seven out of 10 high-schoolers don’t get that much sleep.
According to Titania Jordan, the chief parenting officer of online safety company Bark Technologies, the worst effect of too much screen time for kids is insufficient sleep.
“Especially when you’re a child, growing and adolescent, you’ve got to have consistent sleep,” she said. “There’s so much that happens in the time between you shutting your eyes and opening them again.”
Children who sleep less well grow up differently, she said. They reach puberty later, have higher stress hormones, and grow up shorter.
Often kids choose screens over sleep, Jordan said. Screens are exciting, and the blue light from them can trick the body into feeling like it’s still daytime.
But when kids play games until late at night, it does a number on their mental development, she said.
“Your body is affected in a variety of ways, including your mental health, growth, and development.”
Kids who don’t sleep well struggle to regulate their emotions, remember less, learn less, and are easily distracted.
Parents should keep children’s bedrooms screen-free, and not let them take phones to bed, according to sleep experts. When kids and teenagers get to bed at a decent hour, they do better during the day.
