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Strollerderby
Does this kid have an imaginary friend keeping him company?
I’ll never forget my older daughter’s first heartbreak. She was three and the boy of her dreams left her at the altar.
The boy in question was “Harry Potter”, her imaginary friend who’d been her constant playmate and preschool love interest for a year. One day he was just gone. She came to me in tears, looking for answers. Why didn’t Harry come to their wedding? Where was he? Why couldn’t she find him when he’d been with her for so long?
I was no better equipped to answer these questions than I will be when some real-life boyfriend breaks her heart. I don’t know how Harry Potter became her imaginary friend, or why he suddenly disappeared as quickly as he’d arrived.
She’s not alone, though. Lots of kids have interesting imaginary friends.
Are Classrooms to Blame?
There are many a refrain about “kids today,” and a recent one has been that children don’t have the imagination and creative power as generations before. And this one could be true. In a 2010 study of around 300,000 creativity tests going way back to the 1970s, Kyung Hee Kim, a creativity researcher at the College of William and Mary, found that creativity has decreased among American kids over the years and especially since 1990 where it was found that “children have become less able to produce unique and unusual ideas. “ Not only were they not as creative but they are “also less humorous, less imaginative and less able to elaborate on ideas.”
What is causing this? Continue reading »
Remember the worlds of imagination you traversed as a kid? Sorcerors and dragons sprang from nehind bushes. Robin Hood and his Merry Men roamed the woods behind the house and Marilyn Monroe was hanging out with Madonna in the bathroom mirror, just waiting to be unleashed for a music video shoot.
Or maybe that was just my house.
These days, you can hardly make it through the day without stumbling over some pundit or other bemoaning kids’ lack of imagination, lack of interest in books, and lack of creativity. Newsweek ran a major story this month on the creativity crisis in America.
None of that is in evidence at the make-believe camps that are springing up around the country. Based on popular children’s books, these camps give kids a chance to attend Hogwarts, train with Percy Jackson and the Olympians, or dive into the Daring Book for Girls.
American kids have, for decades, lagged behind European and Asian countries in math and science. But our dirty little secret was always that U.S. kids’ creativity kicked global ass.
At least until the 1990s.
Ever since then, it’s been on a steady decline and nobody is sure why. Writing for Newsweek, Nurtureshock‘s Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, take a look at the crisis and upend assumptions about what creativity is, how it works and who or what might be to blame for its decline. There’s also the interesting history of measuring creativity (who knew!), what and how it has been tested for (hint: not the prettiest oil-on-canvas). Continue reading »
For those of us who live in a cold climate and have high-energy children, and do not have a playroom or extra space of any kind, winter brings a special kind of dread. Namely, the “what in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster am I going to do with these crazy people when it’s snowing and/or too cold to go outside?” kind of dread.
One of my favorite desperation activities is fort building. I remember from my own childhood how much fun it was to collect cushions and chairs and blankets from all over the house and create my own little hidey hole, and my own kids love it too.
Of course, we are not nearly as skilled as Peter Hartlaub appears to be, Continue reading »
Another month, another “holiday.” The goods news? You don’t have to hit Hallmark to celebrate National Inventors’ Month. Just tell your kids to pull out their LEGOs and get building.
Our favorite bitty brick makers are celebrating the “holiday,” with a contest for builders six through thirteen. And with sales like these, you’ve got to think they’re the company to take an inventive cue from. Continue reading »
Most kids play house. Pirates. Unemployed mortgage broker (hey, you go with what you know). But a couple of kids in Germany were entirely more hip to the world.
Two little boys were playing nuclear power station when they had to go home for dinner. Their abandoned “power station” prompted a scare that closed down their entire town. Continue reading »
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