Developing a healthy imagination in childhood creates the skills in adulthood necessary to cope with an ever-changing world. So why are our children constantly being programmed according to someone else’s imagination?

Try this simple experiment at home: Place an ordinary brick on the kitchen table and tell your children they have exactly two and a half minutes to list as many uses for the brick as possible. Anything counts no matter how absurd, ridiculous, or indefensible.  As a rough guide (by no means scientific) a child who comes up with over 30 uses is creative. More than that, highly creative.  OK, I hate categorizing children, I was tagged with a “learning disability” when I was in elementary school. What that really meant was the way I learned didn’t conform to the way educators taught. My mother later told me that I simply had too much imagination and to not worry about what other people said.  Good answer mom.

I was introduced to the brick exercise as a freshman in college, 18 years old. In two and a half minutes I had a list of over fifty uses. The average in the class was over 30. Today I do the same exercise in my class of visual arts majors. The average is below 15. And these are the creative kids. And it seems that every semester they come up with less and less answers, as if their minds can’t untie themselves from reality.

Why the disparity? Over stimulation comes to mind:  video games, music, texting, facebook, internet surfing, movies, TV, cell phones. And play time, what do we do with it now? We structure it. We have play dates where everything is planned. There are no pick-up games of basketball or baseball or backyard football; we have leagues for that. Music and art have been eliminated from our schools. Even a casual visit by a friend is a thing of the past.  And parents, wow, they prowl the hallways in the junior highs making sure their kids are sitting with the popular group, patrol the sidelines making sure their kids are getting enough game minutes, and hovering over homework nudging their children toward the right answer---all because, Heaven forbid, our children fail and we, the perfect parents, are publicly humiliated.

The only media I was exposed to as a kid was old black and white episodes of Tarzan on Saturday mornings. We had long summer days to catch frogs in the canal, build enormous paper airplanes and launch them from our garage roof. We played pick-up games of baseball in the pasture or made up funny games in the basement when it was raining like bowling with food storage. People my age like to lament the loss of those days, as if they were somehow better than the days our children are growing up in. The truth is, our children have it far better than we did. I remember President Hinckley saying at Conference a few years ago that we “live in a time of a thousand opportunities.” So if our children have too little imagination, or have abdicated it to video games; it’s our fault.

A few years ago I did some work for the American Toy Institute. Their slogan is: “The Power of Play.” They had done numerous studies on child development and determined that at the heart of the well-adjusted child was a fearless imagination. Play to a child is where they imagine all kinds of situations in a safe, non-punishing environment. It’s where they try on behaviors and learn traits such as mercy, kindness, assertiveness, forgiveness; not to mention innovation and problem solving in relationships. In short, they learn to succeed. But how can this be? Children need structure 24/7, they need discipline, and they need grown-up mentors to learn those traits.

Says who?

I’ve never read anything anywhere that says the best thing for our children is for someone else to make all decisions for them.  In fact, aren’t we robbing them of their free agency when we program every minute of their day? Can you imagine God having so little faith in us? I recall a plan of total control being pushed aside in favor of agency. And agency can be fettered by so many forces---media over-stimulation, to be sure. But also parents who fear the result of a child left to their own choices. And that brings us back to imagination---the process of visualizing situations and consequences without actually engaging in them. Sort of like role playing. Sort of like wondering. Sort of like wishing. Sort of like dreaming---all of which are good skills to have as say a scientist, an industrial designer, a parent…anybody that lives in an unpredictable world and needs the confidence to adapt, learn and make the best of a real situation.

When my boys were in junior high school, the three of them were huddled around the TV with friends playing a video game. It wasn’t a violent game, it wasn’t lewd in any way. It was just a video game. I turned off the game and asked them why they wanted to play somebody else’s game rather than make up their own.  “Look,” I said. “When you read a book or build a Roman city out of sticks and boxes or map the neighborhood with chalk symbols on the sidewalk, you are using your imagination. When you play a video game you let someone else’s imagination do the work for you.” They waited for a minute then answered: “So?” To which I replied: “So what will happen is eventually the brain cells that control your ability to communicate will die and you’ll only be able to utter one word sentences and grunts.”

“Nuh uhh,” they grunted. Suddenly they realized the curse was real. They ran outside and spent the afternoon building a boxcar out of a garbage can, scrap wood and whatever discarded wheels they could find. After crashing into the neighbor’s rock garden they modified the steering. They crashed into the rose garden next.  What better thing for kids to be doing than trying and failing and trying again?

Let me be the first to say media hysteria is to blame for the anxiety that drives us to don night goggles and follow our children home from dates, or pick up the extension phone and listen to our six-year old talk about movies with a friend.  When media outlets exploded into a million channels on cable, internet, and now Twitter; the competition for advertising dollars drove news folks to search out the sensational. Admit it; a child abducted in Sweden makes you, the parent in Northern California, walk your kids home from school for the next three days; even though they are in high school.

This over-protectedness has driven us to mad levels of control over our children’s lives. There’s even a GPS system you can install on your teenager’s car that tells you where they’ve been.  So now you don’t have anything to talk to them about when they get home; you know where they’ve been! You just nod, like the all-knowing parent that you are.  From that fabulous 80’s movie Footloose, John Lithgow delivers this great line: “If we don’t trust our children, how will they ever learn how to be trustworthy.”

I would add, if we don’t allow our children time to exercise their imagination when they are young, how can we expect them to solve problems, innovate, achieve greatness when they grow-up.

Imagination. Creativity. Problem Solving. Innovation. Progress. Joy. If our children are going to experience the greatest joys in this life, they have to learn how to do the work themselves, learn how to imagine a better way and figure out how to get there. 

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