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So many of us have that creative bug that burrows under our skin, resulting in this wonderful “disease.” While this metaphor may not paint it in the right light, creativity can seem somewhat repellent for certain children. When it comes to creativity, there are so many significant benefits, it exorcizes our demons, gives us an anchor in life, and slowly but surely makes us more intelligent. This is why it is something we should try to pass on to our children. What can we do to help our children fall in love with writing stories and creativity in general?
Get Them Into Reading
If your children are not already keen on reading, this is where you have got to start embedding solid habits. Reading to your child at bedtime is the best place to begin, but you can also start reading with them when they are old enough. Look at the things that they are interested in, and get related books, but also start to think about how the end of a story could be better.
There’s that wonderful sweet spot when your child is five or six years old and they are slowly piecing words together, which allows them to start increasing their comprehension, but you can also go alongside this by talking about the story and asking what other avenues could occur in the story.
This is where interactive TV shows are trying to straddle the balance. Shows on Netflix such as Battle Kitty and Minecraft: Story Mode, where you can choose different permutations can help your children to look at how a story could change, but you then have to stimulate that creativity by starting discussions.
Ignite Their Imagination
With the aforementioned interactive TV shows, there are only a handful of ways a story can go; the reality is that you need to let your child go in whatever direction they want. This is where you could start writing exercises with them, where both of you start with a single prompt that takes you down totally different directions. There are a variety of middle school writing prompts teachers use to ignite imagination which only has to be a sentence.
The beauty in helping your children to start thinking creatively is to give them very, very little. Their imaginations are fantastic things, so we should not force them to write in a specific way- it’s all about having fun. As grown-ups, we can have very strict approaches to writing borne out of years of refining our approach. You do not want your children to fall out of love with writing, which is why you should not think about structure, just let them do what they want!
Help Them Create Stories During Playtime
It’s something that our children do naturally when they are playing with toys, that inevitably creates some form of conflict and a story forms. We’ve got to get it out of our heads that something needs to occur, like an inciting incident and conflict as we know it. When we encourage our children to do more and think beyond a strict level of story that they’ve already come up with, it helps them understand the variety of permutations that makes them a far more effective storyteller.
We need to encourage our children to be storytellers, and this means helping our children to voice concerns, and also use playtime as a way to get their thoughts out. It’s a trick that psychologists use with younger children, by using an external entity, which allows them to verbalize what they are thinking without literally doing it from themselves.
Help Them Get Rid of the Fear of Performance
Some children don’t like you, as the parent, interacting with them, because they are feeling like they are on display.
For many people, writing is a very personal thing. And if you see that your children have started to create stories, and even from a very young age when they have just written a sentence, all you can do is encourage this to help them tap into their imagination, but it also benefits to let them do it in the way they want. We may want to show the world how clever our child is, but if we put their short story on the fridge, it can go one of two ways: they can embrace it or they can recoil.
This is where you need to quietly observe if they really want you to engage on this subject matter; the very simple way to do this is to ask them if they are happy for us to read the story. If they say “no,” don’t feel downhearted, it’s very clear that they want to keep it to themselves and it becomes that personal practice.
Let Them Absorb as Much as Possible
If you want your children to become more creative, you’ve got to give them a wide variety of resources. As a parent, your role is not to give them the things that you had and add a few more to the mixture, but to give them an expansive range of resources.
There are stories in everything, and inspiration takes so many different forms. If you want your children to create, the spark could be anything for them. There are writing prompts, but the best thing you can do is to expose them to anything and everything. Take them to museums, read to them, give them audiobooks, play them all the music under the sun, and when you start to provide a variety of springboards, all of these will not filter into their abilities.
The reality is that a very small percentage may set them off, which is why we also need to keep searching for the great stimulus. If you want your child to fall head over heels in love with creative writing or storytelling, it’s not just about giving them more literature. Getting into writing mode is about the spark that can be set off by so many different things.
