Category: Education

When I was younger, I realized I had no interest in anything that wasn’t creative, and this could be a significant handicap. So if I wanted to learn how to do something, I would assign myself a task. For example, instead of using tutorials and classes to learn about graphic design software, I just started working for my brother and learned on the job.

Once I had kids, I noticed that they behaved similarly. They didn’t want to learn about anything—they wanted to dip their hands in and do things. Just like me, they tend to back into tasks. While other kids learned phonics, my kids refused to sound out words until one day they could read…pretty much anything. When my daughter was homeschooling, it was a duel to the death if I tried to teach her something. But then she’d come up with an idea for a project or a game, and teach herself more than I ever could have in the same amount of time.

I’m not going to take a stand on nature vs. nurture here (and tend to agree with those who say that it’s not a valid classification of how people learn, anyway). But researchers are finding that when they watch people’s brains work, they see marked differences between people who do “creative” work and people whose work is purely technical or organizational. All of these people may have similar brainpower, but use their brains differently.

One researcher, Nancy Andreasen, studied creative writers and is now doing a wider study of people who are high achievers in creative fields (not only the arts but also science and math).

“For years, I had been asking myself what might be special or unique about the brains of the workshop writers I had studied,” she writes in ‘Secrets of the Creative Brain.’ “In my own version of a eureka moment, the answer finally came to me: creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.”

When I got to this text I stopped and immediately highlighted it. It encapsulates both the joys and frustrations of parenting highly creative children. You parents know who you are: other kids use toy cars to play, well, toy cars. Your kids put their toy cars in a pot and cooked them into “drive soup” on their toy stove. Other kids largely accept that we never go up the slide backwards; your kids asked why and then argued a thousand reasons why the rule was wrong and unfair. Other kids make messes; “mess” is a state of being for your kid.

Last year I went to a talk about how to nurture creativity in children, but the question that pertained to my parenting life was quite the opposite: Is it OK if sometimes I really really want to stop the unbridled creativity that is driving me nuts? Can’t a child just set the darn table without building a case worthy of the Supreme Court for why it’s actually not her job?

The answer I came to is something like “yes” and also like “no.” Every time we nurture that independence of thought and randomness of connection that our young children show, we are supporting brains that will one day be able to apply novel approaches to artistic, engineering, and scientific endeavors. On the other hand, one of the jobs of parents is to help our kids become functional adults. Isn’t it part of good parenting to help a child learn where his “off” switch is? Our kids’ future coworkers and spouses will thank us.

Finding the balance between nurturing that little creative mind and shutting off the seemingly nonstop onslaught of free association is something I’ve always struggled with. My own creative brain definitely needs quiet and contemplation, something I had in excess before I had children. Now, sometimes I admit that I just have to say “please. stop. talking. please. stop. now!” to one or other of my kids. At the same time that I know I’m squashing their brains’ healthy bursts of association and originality, I also know that I need to stay sane.

I guess like every issue we face as parents, there’s no single right answer. I hope that I keep the balance tipped toward the nurturing of creativity, but I also know that sometimes the appropriate answer to a whiny “whyyyyyyyyyyyy do IIIIIII have to set the table?” is simply, “Because I said so.”

I’ve been thinking lately about one lesson I learned through parenting a child with behavioral and learning differences. When you parent a child who falls somewhere within that wide field we call “typical,” lots of traditional parenting methods with incentives and consequences might work well enough. But it’s not until we have a child who falls far from the center of the field that we might discover the value of parenting—and teaching—to the positive.

I was most recently reminded of this when my daughter spent a week at her favorite summer camp, Santa Cruz Soccer Camp. The first time I brought her to camp, I was very nervous. I explained that there were various behavioral challenges and that I was willing to stay and help. Coach Bill, without hesitation, asked if she was liable to run off.

“Well, no,” I answered. That was one challenge she’d never presented me with!

“Fine, then,” he said. “We can handle anything else. Go get some time for yourself.”

And that was the end of the idea that I might have to stay and supervise her at soccer camp. The reason Bill was so sure of his camp’s ability to handle my child was simply that they don’t focus on the problems—they focus on success. They call their approach “learning through enjoyment,” but it’s a variation on lots of approaches with different names that stem from one simple idea: kids learn when they enjoy something and are successful at it, not when they are set up to fail and are punished. Lots of kids have learned deep lessons from soccer, drama, writing, and science—I am willing to bet that few have learned from detention.

Kids learn when they feel a reason for learning: they’re having fun, they’re benefiting personally from what they’re doing, or even when they see that someone else is benefiting from what they’re doing. Kids do learn from failure, but only when it’s in the context of a challenge that makes sense to them. Kids don’t learn when they’re scared—or rather, they don’t learn the lesson we think they’ve learned. A student who is afraid of failing history doesn’t learn history because he’s afraid, but he may well learn how to search for plagiarized history papers online. A child who is afraid her parent will punish her if she’s rude doesn’t learn the value of being polite—she learns how to avoid punishment.

Now that my daughter is eleven, one of the things I’m looking forward to in the near future is leadership training at her soccer camp. This year when Bill asked all the coaches who had been through leadership training to step forward, all but one did (and the one who didn’t just simply didn’t grow up in Santa Cruz!). These wonderful people who spend their summers teaching soccer and success to kids are now adults or almost adults, and many of them started in this very camp when they were five or six. Leadership taught them the value of success, not just for themselves but the value of helping others achieve success.

I looked at a number of potential schools for my daughter to attend next year, and one thing that struck me now that I have this awareness of the value of success is how the staff view their jobs. At one school I visited, the staff—from principal on down—talked somewhat like jailers. They focused on the negative aspects of young teens, talked about all the problems that our kids would face, and warned us that our sweet children were about to turn into sullen, uncommunicative teens.

Guess where my daughter is not going?

Now that she’s a tween, she’s gotten past being a “troublemaker” in the classroom. I don’t expect her to have disciplinary problems, so why would I care how the staff treats these problems? The reason is that how we view the people we work with—whether they’re preschoolers or high schoolers—will affect their achievements. Schools with cultures that focus on success will find that they have fewer problems to begin with. They will find that when you focus on students’ positive qualities, those positive qualities will shine brighter. The students’ problems—their negative qualities—will not disappear, but they won’t be always in the spotlight.

Of course, no approach is 100% successful, so sure, you’ll be able to show me students who didn’t succeed in spite of a focus on the positive. But I’ve seen it with so many children—and the people at soccer camp can vouch for the approach with even more authority. Focusing on a student’s strengths and making sure they’re having fun while they’re working hard is a time-tested recipe for success.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I sure do wish there were some way to have summer camp all year round!