Increasing Baby’s Creativity
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I like to consider myself relatively creative - I’m a writer and I teach acting to kids part-time so I would like to think that there’s some creativity in there somewhere - so when my first baby came along I was determined to give her as much opportunity as I could to allow her creativity to blossom. Now that she is approaching age 5 and she’s fantastically creative, I feel somewhat qualified to share what I did when she was a little baby to start her out on the right foot.
Here are some things I did to get her creative juices flowing:
- She didn’t watch TV. It wasn’t until she was nearly two years old and her younger brother came along that I started allowing her to watch anything on TV. All my other mom friends thought I was crazy (”How do you get time to yourself?” was something I heard a lot), but I wanted her to examine the world around her…not the world within the television.
- I asked her a lot of questions. My daughter and I spent a lot of time wandering through art museums, the zoo, parks, and even the mall, and I would narrate everything we were doing. I would ask her questions too, trying to get her to use her creativity. My questions were usually attempts to prompt her to create a story. Why do you think that man is in such a hurry? I wonder why they painted that wall blue? What shape does that cloud look like? I asked her these questions long before she was able to respond.
- I showed her a lot of new things. One day my husband came home from work and looked quizzically at the bed, which was full of clothes that I certainly wouldn’t wear during my day to day Mommy routine: silk pajamas, sequined dress, etc. “What’s this all about?” he asked. I replied with, “I was showing her new textures today.” He looked at me like I was crazy, but I was pretty sure she got a kick out of the experience.
- I didn’t limit her. Our mall has a colorful play area, but oftentimes it was too full of rambunctious big kids to allow barely-crawling babies to explore. Instead of admitting defeat and not allowing my daughter to check out something new and exciting, my friend and I used our strollers as barricades and created a space for our babies to get out of the strollers and explore. Our babies were thrilled to try something like this, and my friend and I laughed later about how we took a section of the play area hostage for twenty minutes.
Even though your baby may not even acknowledge your presence much yet, there is no reason why you shouldn’t start fostering her creativity. I think that creativity comes from a great deal of freedom to explore and experience new things, so try to give your baby the opportunity to check things out for herself. If she wants to linger at a flower, let her linger. If she wants to stare at a flashing sign, let her stare. Who knows…she may be forming a story in her head.
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