Creativity

Disciplining, imposing obedience and socially acceptable behaviour on the child is like pruning a tree to become a Bonsai! These up bringing patterns have a tremendous effect in lowering the creativity and intellectual growth of a child! So, the conventional methods of up bringing have to be abandoned in favour of more sensitive and aware ways of bringing up children if we want them to be bright and capable of doing original thinking!

Listening to the child, entertaining and discussing the child’s ideas on every subject, despite the fact the parents may feel the ideas are impractical or impossible, will lead the child to think out of the box and not be a robotic thinker as most of us are!

Creativity or original thinking cannot be taught! We can only help the child in becoming creative by positive reinforcements of his/her original thinking! The fact remains that no idea is stupid or impossible! It can be ahead of time, but that is about all! The present state of technology may not be able to support it now! For example, thinking of humans flying in the air before the 19th century would have been considered as a stupid idea! Now, it is commonplace!

Creativity needs time and space and so, do ensure that the child gets a lot of time and space everyday to do his own thing! Parents who keep their children busy doing things, classes, activities, sports etc should realise that they may be doing this at the cost of creativity in the child! Try and balance all this so that the child also has time to himself every day to do things that he/she wants to do! Parents definitely should introduce the child to new activities but the sustenance of the same should be on the basis of the child’s interest and his/her own motivation.