Raising My Creative Kid
Being an artist, married to a user experience and design manager, my house would naturally be a super creative place, right?
Hell, yeah!
Except my husband and I both need outer order and clean spaces in order to be productive creators. We’re tidy and thoughtful about what kind of space allows us to be creative.
Our son however, does not care one bit. Sometimes on a Saturday morning, I will open the pocket door to the playroom to discover a jungle of a mess. String taped to walls, bits of cut paper everywhere, a potential avalanche of red seeds and beads at the top of a ramp. But I love it. I wish I were more like him sometimes.
When he was very young, he started asking me if I would let him play with packaging and boxes before I sent them to the recycling bin. Yeah, sure. Have at it, monkey! Over time, this went from a box here or there, to egg cartons, yogurt cups, every kind of platic bottle, take out trays, and of course popsicle sticks being saved for him to play with.
This eventually turned into me saving a giant cardboard box that was more like a trough for him to keep his “materials” in. Then we graduated to a more formal plastic box that wouldn’t bend or brake. Along the way, I gave him rolls of masking tape, yarn I would never use, binder clips, salvaged reams of colored paper, packing supplies, corks, magnets, broken camera parts. He even started collecting seeds and rocks to incorporate into his inventions.
And I would definitely say inventions. Everything he makes seems to be engineered with some sort of mechanical purpose in mind.
At one point I thought I would get into it with him. I bought books about tinkering and showed him how to make a fancy catapult, but he was disinterested. Why? I thought. Why won’t he let me show him some cool physics? But honestly, I don’t need to. He figures things out on his own and makes way more interesting stuff than a canned catapult.
I think about it this way. He doesn’t get to play outside as much as we would like. Most of his young life we have been concerned that his allergies will get so bad that he will end up in the hospital again. Just roaming through nature, discovering dirt and sticks and plants is vital to growing up. It's essential to the “unstructured play” that child psychologists and educators talk about when they worry about a “Nature Deficit Disorder."
So on days when the allergy count is high or his skin becomes irritated and itchy, he gets to play indoors, figuring out how to fold the perfect paper airplane and making things that look like magnetic fishing poles or skis or grappling hooks. And I don’t do anything but sit quietly in the living room while he visits me every now and then to show me what he invented.
