Creative Making

Empowerment Tool

Creative making is a gateway to many positive emotions, including flow, authorship, and connection to something bigger. You don't need to be "creative" or "talented" or worry about whether your child is either. The point is to explore materials and ideas, and follow one move after another. This leads to a state of flow, where one loses a sense of self and time, and is guided by a creative process that often feels like it is unfolding through you, rather than being controlled by you.

Children can often get into this state quite naturally (which is why it can be hard to get them to stop doing things and make transitions!), but as adults we have a more developed sense of time, and an internal critic and to-do list than can make it harder to surrender ourself to creative making and flow.

HOW TO DO IT

The most important ingredients are time, available materials and space, and a lack of inhibition.

For better or worse, creative projects can take up a lot of time. Younger kids will have a limited attention span, but as they get older, the amount of time kids can spend on art, music, or other creative projects is almost endless. For this reason, it is nice to allow time, to get into the zone (flow), develop a concept, and work through various solutions.

On the flip side, however, don't not start a creative project because time is limited. If you have supplied handy, there's no reason not to pull out the paints 30 minutes before soccer practice for example. Sometimes ideas and project marinate better with some time away. Try to be flexible, enjoy the making, and give it time - whether in one session, or several.

Creative making is more likely to happen if it is easy to act when inspiration strikes your child, and they aren't afraid mom will be mad about the mess. Space is always at a premium in family homes, but try to make creative activities easy to access, set up, and clean up.

This might involve:

A self-help ‘art-cart’ or cupboard, a basket of available materials, or a writing notebook at the ready, so they can help themselves to creative materials when they feel inspired
Trays, newspaper, or cardboard at the ready, so you’re not worried about stains, and clean-up can be easy
Cleaning up and putting things away regularly is helpful too, both to provide an open space for working, and because fewer materials at a time have been shown to actually enhance creativity

Nothing spoils the will to experiment with new things or create like fear of a harsh critic. Give your child the space to try, learn, and be bad at things. Praise effort, process, and things that you genuinely esteem about their result.

This does not mean blithely telling them they're "amazing" or "the best" at something when they are clearly not (that's gaslighting). Let feedback come mainly from teachers, coaches or their own assessment.

Only offer your suggestions when the timing is right and they ask for your help. In these instances, try to be descriptive rather than judgemental... while also giving them the credit that they can bear sincere and kindly meant feedback.

Embrace opportunities for playfulness during creative making sessions. Use the materials in funny ways, or act out characters being drawn. Making art is a way to process salient issues and emotions, and levity can sometimes be just what is needed.

Creativity requires both abundant divergent thinking, *and* useful convergent thinking. Having a million ideas, but being too sensitive to take feedback and refine them, doesn’t lead to useful innovations. The innovation culture of Silicon Valley preaches “fail fast,” which means develop ideas, test them out, find out what's not working, and iterate - and do it quickly and without attachment to the first idea. This reflects a growth mindset, and the understanding that great innovations are not really singular stokes of genius, but rather the result of trying, failing, and tweaking.

To foster an iterative mindset:

Instead of pronouncing something your child has made good or bad, talk about how it is functioning, and test it out together if possible. Eg:

“This really wet dark paint in the corner makes me feel like something is hangin over my head.” “Let’s try this puppet out. She’s having a hard time holding up her head because it’s really heavy compared to her neck. We have a drooping puppet! What do you think about that?”

Kids, like all of us, can feel crushed when an idea that felt amazing and exciting, meets a whiff of disapproval or failure. The key is to normalize this process for your child, for example by saying:

“A great idea is just the beginning. All ideas come out rough, and have to be polished by trying them out, getting feedback, and making a new version. This is called iterating.”

It will help your child get used to this process if you listen to their disappointed feelings, when an idea doesn’t work perfectly. Also use storytelling, either recounting times when your initial didn’t work, but then out made it better. Or, even more effective, remind them of a story from their own past.

After they’ve processes any disappointment or embarrassment, ask questions to get then started on the next version:

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“This really wet dark paint in the corner makes me feel like something is hangin over my head.” “Let’s try this puppet out. She’s having a hard time holding up her head because it’s really heavy compared to her neck. We have a drooping puppet! What do you think about that?”

“A great idea is just the beginning. All ideas come out rough, and have to be polished by trying them out, getting feedback, and making a new version. This is called iterating.”

What did we learn from that experiment? How might we solve that problem?