Gone are the days of allowing our children the freedom to play – to just be. In today’s fast world parents and peer pressure compel our children to achieve, bringing home awards, medals or certificates, but it’s a focus on encouraging them to be free to create that is needed. Parents need to know that pure enjoyment is the foundation for all creative talent and through creative expression children can process the world.

Creativity development provides a child with a sense of ownership and fosters mental growth through the encouragement of new things, ideas, ways of thinking and problem solving.

Your child displays creativity when she bangs a drum to the beat of the dishwasher or makes a drawing, clay animal or finger paints. Creative children are also at work when they put on your old shoes and play house, insist that you set a place for an imaginary friend at the dinner table, tell you a tall tale about how the milk really got spilled or beg you to get rid of the monsters that inhabit the bedroom closet.

Play is the creative work of a child. It is the process that’s important, not the end product. As parents and caregivers we can provide them with the tools, space and opportunities and support their imagination without imposing our restrictions or points of view.

As a parent or provider, you have an enormous influence on your child's creativity but it involves you to let go a little and leave artistic and inventive decisions up to them.

Children love to sing, create, move, and think in new and inventive ways.

Here are a few ideas for you to try out at home, taking into consideration your child’s age, attention span, likes, dislikes and personality to tailor your scheduled activities:

puppet shows, bake, leave plain paper and khokis in the playroom, read to them-a lot, dress-up box, make-believe play, finger paints, white board & markers, make up stories together, create projects from recycling materials, create music with household items, use shaving cream drawing on big windows, dictate stories, bead, use glue…always have glue around!

Because the young mind is such a rich environment, as you reflect upon how best to promote your child’s innate creativity, consider the following:

1. Creativity is not a pastime. It’s an essential part of who we are. Let them know that you value their creativity, and help them grow and explore by modelling creativity yourself.
   
   
2. Avoid evaluating & withhold judgment. You may wish to help through critique, but creativity flourishes in a non-evaluative atmosphere. Despite personal preferences, show them that everything they express is worthy of your love and attention. Many sensitive children are frightened away from creative activities when they pick up the idea that they are expected to produce "something”.
   
   
3. No surveillance. Hovering over a child, however good our intentions, has been proven to stifle their creative juices. Instead, create a safe environment where they can explore creativity on their own. Remember that the energy spent in conforming to rules of neatness and order will be taken from the energy of exploration and originality. Elaborate preparation and clean up requirements may end up taking more time than the activity itself.
   
   
4. Offer guidance sparingly. Constant reminders to improve themselves can undermine a child’s self-esteem, sending out the unintended message: you need to change, you aren’t good enough as you are. Remember, we don’t always need to teach our kids to be better, just encourage them to be themselves.
   
   
5. Cultivate originality. Let your child know how great it is to be different, and that they bring something unique to this world. The greatest innovators have always been those who thought differently from the rest.

With a passion for witnessing children’s enthusiasm, here are Lara’s Creative Tips you could use at home:

Schedule it! Set aside time each and every day for some sort of creative expression for your child.

Plan it! A few nights a week reference ideas for art projects and creative activity ideas for toys to make from items found around the home the next day. A 2 1/2 year old who has a low art drawer in the kitchen has a creative head start over the same-age child who has to wait until someone has time to get the crayons down from a high shelf.

Join in! And then of course, as me-time offers with its adult-time activities. What is fun as adults is to relax our own mind and enter the world of our child and see how their mind creates and perceives the world around them.

About Lara Chaitman & Me-Time:
With an inherent creative ability, keen sense of adventure, playful personality coupled with her vast experience with children Lara Chaitman has opened an activity centre in Green Point Cape “me-time”. It is designed to evoke the pure enjoyment factor in children between 18 months and 12 years old, providing a safe space in which they can just be... free to create, play and learn. It provides child-time activities to develop creativity that include art through drawing, painting, sculpting and playing, craft, yoga and chess classes. The adult-time offering includes a choice of ceramics, art, yoga and first aid courses as well as parenting workshops. It also organises creative birthday parties and hosts annual holiday programmes. www.me-time.co

Posted: 8 March 2011

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