*This blog post summarizes the article in the link above
We all want our children to be successful, but do we want them to be original and creative? Of course we do! This may lead them to earning a Nobel Prize or curing a fatal disease. But that type of creative thinking does not stem from rushing your kids to piano, dance, and soccer all after school. Here are some strong pointers based on research on how to raise your child to be creative:
- Practice makes perfect but doesn’t make new – Children lose the chance to be original when their main goal is to receive approval from their parents and teachers. They end up practicing someone else’s craft/material until they get that approval. Encourage your kids to come up with new ideas or ask them how they can do it differently.
- Your value system doesn’t have to be theirs as well – A Harvard psychologist determined that it would be best to “place emphasis on moral values, rather than on specific rules” and that “emphasis was placed on the development of one’s own ethical code”.
- All the greats were as terrible as their peers when starting out – Respond to your children’s intrinsic motivation and natural interest by supporting them in what they want to do. Also, their teachers don’t have to be the best there are; they just have to make it fun.
The fun fact of the article seems to be that Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely to perform as actors, dancers or magicians; 12 times more likely to write poetry, plays or novels; seven times more likely to dabble in arts and crafts; and twice as likely to play an instrument or compose music.
Albert Einstein said “The theory of relativity occurred to me by intuition, and music is the driving force behind this intuition. Love is a better teacher than a sense of duty”. His mother had him in violin lessons at the age of five, but he only truly discovered his real love for music in his teenage years while he was no longer in lessons. He had re-discovered all the beauty that was Mozart’s sonatas.