Raising an imaginative child doesn’t have to be hard work: responding to your child’s curiosity, observing the world around you and taking breaks from daily routine can help develop your child’s ability to imagine better scenarios than those available in reality.
Too many children are raised with strict rules that make it difficult for them to think creatively. But creativity is important and will no doubt help your child build the skills they need to solve problems as an adult. It is for this reason that you need to nourish creative thinking in children like you’d have taught them to ride a bike or interact with others.
Now, of course, teaching creative thinking is not straight as a line. It’s a curve of incidents and situations that demand actions based on thinking out of the box. To encourage creative thinking in your child, the following are some very useful tips that can be helpful.
- Problem solving – There are numerous times when your child shows up with questions of either academics or general things. At those times, instead of gratifying them instantly with a ready answer, make them ponder over the questions and think of probable answers before offering your answer. This will push them to think outside the box. Also explain to them if they fail to understand all by themselves.
- Playing helps – In today’s setting it is utterly difficult for parents to take out time to play with the kids. However, if not everyday, at least try and spend some time playing with your child once or twice a week. Another thing to keep in mind is that you’re controlling their thoughts while they are at play. Regardless of how dumb chasing false fairies may seem, remember you’re playing with a kid that is imagining and trying to understand the world through their limited knowledge. You can obviously pass a few notes of knowledge every now and then.
- Ask the right questions – Spending quality time with your kids doesn’t necessarily need to be restricted to playing. Besides reading and doing chores together, you may have interactive sessions with your kids where you get to ask questions and they need to answer. Now even though the answers don’t have to be always correct, the questions can. Try asking about their goals, thoughts on how certain things work, etc.
- Do chores together – Often neglected, doing chores together can immensely pace up your child’s learning process. Besides spending some quality time, doing chores together also enables your little one to learn from you. A widely popular fact is that children mimic and learn, they see and they learn. Thus, you can present situations and ask them to help you solve them.
- Upgrade yourself – Now parenthood isn’t easy and there are often a lot of things that we don’t always know. It is thus necessary for you to keep up with things that your child might have queries about. Also, you must know that your child is keenly observing you at all times. What you do, how you deal with people and situations is obviously going to have a strong effect on how they do and think things.
- A little praise goes a long way – Praising your little one’s efforts and not their results, is important. This sets a precedent that your child’s ability is not entirely dependent on their success or failure. “I am proud of you for studying so hard. I’m aware that you had spent a really long time preparing and you did great and that is what matters most.” Encouraging children to use their minds for learning or studying will be remembered longer than any grades they get on tests.
- Talk about history – Every family has certain stories of fun and chaos. There is often wisdom and creative thinking that’s hidden under the surface. By narrating those to your kids, you will be offering him a great story as well as a similar situation to think and compare when they’re in a similar spot.
- Allow them some space – Now as western as this may sound, it is important to offer some space to your children. They need their own time to explore and experiment with things that interest them. Spoon feeding that little one every time they come across a challenge is not the best way to go about encouraging creative thinking.
- Consume travel related content – There are plenty of websites which is live and free for everybody’s consumption. Wander & Beyond is one of them. They talk about everything related to travelling and living outdoor. It has 15 million yearly visitors. To grow and have different world perspective, you need to travel and this website will really help you. Travel and Leisure is one of the other website.
