The 3 principles for nurturing kids creativity
“watch the excitement when kids alight on a new solution… they feel their new idea as an all-over body experience and can’t but help to jump for joy.”
BIFKiDS resolves to 3 core principles. Think of them as our user guidelines. Or, if you know a little about organisation and culture, they’re like our ‘values’; three enduring beliefs which informs our parenting of little creative problem solvers.
Little people with big ideas
Two parts to this.
Firstly, we think of kids not as children but as little people; it completely changes how we interact with their creativity.
Secondly, their ideas are waaaaay bigger than anything us adults can create, because they’re freer and more open, and obviously less encumbered by experience (they literally haven’t seen most things before!). The capacity for pure, natural curiosity is what we want to help them to hold onto.
Little people in the big outdoors
The science is in, ʻplay’ is absolutely critical to creativity - whether it’s ‘free play’ that’s self-directed by kids or directed play in which us grown-ups have a role. Critical to play is the idea of outdoors and the natural world.
Modern childhood has become urban, and indoors. As best we can, we adults have to - have to - stretch for more outdoor adventuring because it is so very important for creative and collaborative problem solving and (so the science suggests) their whole-person development.
Little moments are big moments
Parenting can be an anxious activity, fraught with the constant challenge of whether we’re getting it right!
Parenting creative problem solving doesn’t have to be yet another anxiety. Actually, it’s quite simple - every day there will be moments when kids present their creativity. It could be an idea they’ve made, a game they’re playing, something they want you to see or join in with. At these moments, stop what you’re doing, curiously engage and say the following; “you’re such an Ideas Girl/Ideas Boy."
Learn more about the book on the link below: