Encouraging creativity in children

Creativity and design are serious business

18th September 2019

by Brett Capron

Painting by Willow Capron (5 years old)

Most parents will agree that kids are born with a huge percentage of their personalities and preferences baked-in. There is no doubt that nurturing, education and encouragement can help children to improve certain skills and abilities over others, but strong preferences, behaviours and talents are exhibited almost from day one.

So why as a society do we educate the creativity out of children? Why do we implicitly and explicitly discourage children from seriously pursuing certain fields of interest?

As Sir Ken Robinson has been pointing out for several decades the schooling and university system in the western world has evolved from the old-world aim of producing workers and managers for the industrial revolution. This evolution has resulted in an education system that values routine, repetitive and predictable professions. The logic and convergent thinking based sciences and hands-on skills required by the workers and managers of an 18th century factory. These discipline biases (language, mathematics, and traditional sciences) have been further entrenched by decade upon decade of parents and teachers encouraging children to pursue traditional, reliable and secure paths to employment.

Finding something in life that you truly love doing and are talented in, is a joy and better still if you can carve out a living being paid to do it. But, perhaps the ultimate is achieving ‘flow’. A state of immersive focus, where hours simply flash past with ease as you work away at your task of passion.

Creative children often happy pour hours into creative tasks, happily engrossed. Imagine how enjoyable life could be if you were paid every day to do something you love, something you are so passionately focused on that time becomes virtually irrelevant.

So should we encourage creativity in children so they can find their passion?

Yes, but that isn’t the only reason.

Firstly, your child’s passion may not lie in a creative discipline. But encouraging them to try and experiment with many different types of creative endeavours only increases the chances they will find their true calling.

However, the most pragmatic and practical reason for encouraging creativity in children, is exactly the same as the traditional justification for encouraging an interest in language, mathematics, and traditional sciences.

Jobs.

With the rise of automation and AI now and into the future it is a given that we will see significant changes in how many people are required to perform some jobs, and changes in some fields no longer requiring any human workers.

While it is almost impossible to predict where AI can ultimately lead, especially if we end up in a future where AI machines begin to learn and potentially develop future iterations of themselves. It is universally accepted that the routine, repetitive and predictable jobs are likely to be the first that are replaced by robots, computers, cloud based systems and AI machines.

It is not impossible to imagine AI machines and robots that are capable of artistic and creative tasks. However, the true randomness, intuition, illogical decision making, subjectivity, emotion and inspiration of creativity and design will likely be hard to replicate with AI.

So, encourage creativity in your children because they may find their passion, they may find a profession and a job. And, because in the future creative jobs and design jobs may be the only jobs left.