What Children Can Teach Us About Creativity

I am not sure why struggle is so overrated and ease, fun and play get such a bad rap when it comes to learning something new or creating anything worthwhile. When we look at young children, they are learning machines, mastering walking, talking, language, relating to others. They have an overwhelming amount of learning on their agenda and it does not let up. 

They are navigating a world they have never been in before and have to learn all the norms and societal conditions required of them. From the minute they awaken to when they sleep, almost all of their days involve learning a new skill. And yet they do with such ease and enjoyment. They are engaged in living and exploring and trying and failing. They go all in and they do not reprimand themselves on how slow they are in taking up a new endeavour like tying their shoelaces or how that clock time thing is eluding them. They stick at it, until they get it. Resilience at its best. 

My theory is that they participate in this marathon of learning by incorporating play, joy and allow ease into it. They do not hold up all their learning objectives and decide that this human thing is just one uphill struggle and they would rather opt out of understanding why we have an alphabet or why it is that they must share their favourite food groups with siblings. They inject an element of playfulness into all that they do and so they take in all these new ideas and concepts. 

I am advocating that we as adults have much to learn, especially when it comes to creativity from our younger generations. It is not just that they bring their open, light playfulness to the table. They also have their imaginations on supercharge. They can go straight from a maths class into the playground and imagine that they are astronauts on another planet for the 15 minutes of freedom that they are afforded. They make the best of each segment of time on offer and they work with what they have. Give them a toilet roll and they will shape it into a rocket and imagine where that rocket will land and what that land will look and feel like. They believe in their imaginations and in themselves. Most of all they don’t take themselves too seriously. 

Adults on the other hand replace fun and lightheartedness with struggle and opt out of imaginative play of any kind. Now before I hear the echoes of mortgages and bills to pay, it is all true. Adults have a level of responsibility that children do not have. We also hold an exponential amount of freedom and power that children do not get to experience until much later on in their lives. In fairness, children are dealt a hand that they have to play with the levels of vulnerability and dependence that they have to put into the hands of their primary caregivers. Their power and freedoms are limited to what the adults in their lives afford them. 

So as much as adults have certain responsibilities that are undeniable, they also have a responsibility to themselves to make life a bit more playful and enjoyable as they can in whichever ways that they can.

After all, if you want to engage in some form of creative play, it is shortsighted to say that your time is taken up with the heavy burdens placed upon adults and so you are forfeiting any rights to even take 15 minutes out of your day to play, to make art, to do something you choose to do that involves firing up your imagination and taking yourself to different places and creating from there. 

If we want to succeed at something, one of the first things we do is look towards someone who has already accomplished that goal with success and learn the ways that they did it. And so I suggest that one of the best examples of taking on new challenges and using imagination to create are children. They are the perfect candidates to study and learn from if we are wanting to engage in some creative explorations of our own and learn new skills. 

Are you willing to fail over and over and still keep trying? Can you learn to use your imagination to visualise what it is you would like to play with in your world and bring it to life, even if all you have in your possession is some tissue paper and an empty toilet roll? Are you willing to go all in with your creative adventures for the sheer joy of it and not expect yourself to create a masterpiece? Could you grant yourself the permission to make terrible art and then proudly display it on your fridge door to signify the fact that you had a go? 

Creativity requires the children in us to come out and play. We do enough adulting in our days to at least grace ourselves with this opportunity for even a tiny part of our day. So if you fancy writing a short story or creating a collage, then take a look at a young person in your life, watch how they might go about this and replicate their ways. Chances are you will see that they will make it happen with the most basic of materials, smallest of spaces and whatever environment that they find themselves in. 

Let us all take children as our creative mentors when it comes to making art in any form. Let us adopt their playful ways and use our imaginations with their abandon. We have a lot to teach the young and they have a lot to teach us too. Let us learn from them.