Nurturing Your Child's Creativity

Here are some tips to inspire creative thinking:

• Shop for toys that are interactive and can be used more than one way. Instead of coloring books, provide construction paper and crayons; instead of talking figures, help your child make up silly voices for plain-jane dolls and stuffed animals; instead of buying toys that only do one thing, show how wooden blocks and household items can become just about anything with a little imagination.

• Improvise. Instead of running to the store the next time your child wants something, think about ways to create what you need. Could a laundry basket and a football be a basketball set? Could you make kneepads from bubble wrap and duct tape? Instead of stepping in immediately to solve her problems, brainstorm together and encourage her to take a risk. It’s okay if her ideas don’t always work; independent thinkers need to learn resiliency, too.

• Encourage confidence, not conformity. So one sock’s blue and the other one’s red; so her bird has three wings. If you want to raise an original thinker, praise originality.

• Turn off the TV! (Come on, you knew that was coming.) Read stories and get them involved: “What would you do? How do you think that makes him feel?”) Ask them to tellyou a story. Close the book and make up a story or repeat a classic folk tale; without illustrations, their imagination will run wild.

• Give ‘em time to daydream. Kids who race from school to scheduled activity to play-date don’t have the time to engage their imaginations. Let them be bored once in a while; they may surprise you with what they can dream up.

Need more ideas? Use your imagination!

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