Give your children the space and time to imagine…and watch their creativity flourish.
If someone hadn’t imagined it, we would never have had planes, electricity, the Ajanta paintings, the Qutub Minar, great stories. Invention, creativity, inspiration, discoveries… they have all been fuelled by people who have used their imagination. Or one should say, by people whose imagination was allowed to flourish freely.
Today, our children seem to have too little time to imagine. Between school work, home work, classes, TV, video games, where is the scope for a child to simply be, and to let his imagination entertain him? Earlier, with much fewer sources of passive entertainment (TV and video games) and knowledge-gathering (the internet, CDs) available, children simply had to actively use their imagination to find amusement as well as to discover how things worked.
Along with a good education, access to hobbies, vacations and entertainment, we simply must gift our children the time and space to play and work with their imagination. Sadly, for decades now, the Indian school child’s introduction to the world of art is through a prescribed, rigid subject: draw a rainy day. It’s the same with writing: write about your holiday. And down the decades, the contents of these paintings and essays simply don’t change. As long as there are raincoats, dashes of blue crayon signifying rain, the child has drawn ‘correctly’. As long as there is mention of a journey, some monument…we are satisfied – our child has ‘completed’ the essay on her holidays.
This way, there is simply no scope or encouragement given to ‘think out of the box’. While in actual fact, most children notice and respond to the most unusual and great variety of things on a rainy day or on their vacation – things that escape the notice of most adults. And, most importantly, a child does not have to even go anywhere, or actually experience something, to come up with an imaginative set of impressions.
The two run-away successes – Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series – are indeed a refreshing return to imagination. However, they are still passive forms of entertainment, and are not a substitute for nurturing our own kids’ imagination. Children’s imagination needs an outlet. It used to be a natural process at one time, since they dreamt-up games and inventions, magical places and people. Today, when they are forced to be constantly rational, focused and real, and even worse, constantly fed pre-digested fun and information, they are in danger of getting bored, understimulated, and even depressed.
One mother complained that she ‘caught’ her 12-year-old daughter making odd climbing hand-movements in the air. When asked what she was doing, the child guiltily said ‘nothing’. This made the mother even more anxious, convinced now that her child was behaving ‘abnormal’. Finally, at the end of the day, the child revealed that she had just been trying to imagine what it would be like to walk vertically – like a spider or a lizard. She had been trying to imagine the feeling, as well as the technicalities: which leg goes first, then which follows, etc! But the whole episode was seen in the house as ‘crazy’ behaviour.
Let’s give our children some credit – of being creatures with far more joy, curiosity, humour and imagination than us adults! And let’s nurture these qualities instead of ‘straightening them out’.