Encouraging creativity at home is very beneficial to a child’s emotional health, problem solving skills and physical body. In this post you will find 17 easy ways to raise a creative child and learn more about the benefits of developing creativity in children.
How to raise a creative child
W.E.B Dubois once said, “Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.”
Being a creative and crafty mom, I am always trying to find new and fun out of the box ways to encourage creativity at home. I can see my daughter following suit. She comes up with some pretty awesome craft ideas and her playtime story lines are genius. I hope to encourage this throughout her life. In this post, I will share with you 17 Simple ways that you can encourage creativity in your child.
But first, let’s discuss why creativity is important in the first place.
Benefits Of Creativity
Being creative is much more than just having fun, although that is very important too.
Developing creativity skills can help encourage other areas of development. The benefits of being creative are:
- Develop Problem Solving Skills
- Develop Communication Skills
- Stress Relief
- Increases Brain Function
- Can Help Increase or Regulate Moods
This is true for adults and children: Being creative is good for the soul! This could be why so many children are drawn to using coloring books during their quiet time activities.
How To Raise Creative Kids
We know we want creative children, but how we help the kids unleash their creativity? How do we encourage their creative development?
The first step is to remember it is not about the result or the final project, it is about the process.
It does not matter if a child’s painting is a mixture of 10 different colors of paint that turned into an ugly and unplanned brown. The process that the child went through to get to this brown color was a learning experience. By choosing to mix each color that was in front of her, she learned that mixing multiple colors makes the color brown. Often times, creativity is developed through process art activities. It’s fascinating to watch a child explore and if you watch closely you can see the wheels in your child’s head turning! (Hand painting, shaving cream painting and finger painting are great process art activities.)
Often times when we think of creativity we think of arts and crafts, which it is and one of my personally favorite ways be creative. There is more to creativity, though.
17 ways to encourage creativity in your child’s life:
- Let your child make up or change the rules of a game.
- Let her completely dress herself – even if it is stripes, flowers, polka dots, & zig zags all in one outfit.
- Give your child a camera and let her take pictures of what catchers HER eye.
- Tell ghost stories.
- Give your child a dress up trunk full of dress up supplies. Join in on the imaginary play like in this Mom and Me pretend play picnic activity.
- Ask open ended questions.
- Take crayons and paper everywhere. Use down time, like at a restaurant or doctor appointment, to draw or color in a different environment. Take drawing books out with you and print out these fun drawing frames.
- Use recyclables to build ‘something’, let your child be the engineer.
- Build a living room fort and decorate it with real household items.
- Listen to music & dance.
- Have a reading corner.
- Speaking of reading… read a lot of books!
- Go on tours: art museum, science museum, fire station, zoo, etc.
- Create art, read or play a board game – OUTSIDE.
- If your child has an idea, don’t squash it. Run with it.
- Choose open ended toys that foster that creativity.
- Set up a play area at home.
Also, remember that mistakes are an important part of the process. We all make them but instead of being upset by those mistakes, use them to grow and learn.
The benefits of being creative go far beyond their ability to draw a train or paint a rainbow. Creativity is the co-pilot to problem solving, resourcefulness, communication, and so much more. Creativity is nourished with play and what kids see as fun. Let them have fun. Let them decide what to do, even if it’s a crazy idea. Play along side them. Creativity will follow. All these things are raising a creative kid!
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