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Unleashing
Imagination
by Claudia
Goodman
It was a long,
tedious Sunday afternoon in the middle of winter. As usual, I had
encouraged the children to play "Sunday games." We had
a list of suggested activities, but they had tired of their usual
pastimes and were ready to try something new. Suddenly I was aware
of a great commotion coming from the living room. My older son Paul
burst into the room. "Mom, the younger kids are playing "'Snake
in the Grass.' I thought you said they had to play Sunday games."
I walked into
the room to question the enthusiastic players. "Oh, we're not
playing 'Snake in the Grass,'" explained David. "We're
playing 'Missionary in the City!'"
Children have
no end of imagination, and what a priceless gift it is. If only
we as adults can enhance and nurture it and not allow it to lapse
into dormancy. It has been said, "A child's play is his work."
As I watch my eighteen-month-old grandson Alex intent on unlocking
the car and fitting the key in the ignition, then trying to plug
in the vacuum, take the front cover off and remove the bag, I realize
anew how insatiable a child's appetite for learning is. How do we
unleash the power of imagination and keep it growing through the
years? There are several things we can do.
#1: Give
children the gift of time-not only your time, but their own time,
to spend on their "work."
Start by turning
off the TV or very selectively monitoring its use. Even good videos
should be viewed on a limited basis. Try to watch the shows you
have chosen with your children whenever possible. There are many
good things to be learned from TV. Children can learn numbers, letters,
shapes, how to treat others, facts about the world, etc. Some programs
even encourage creativity. However, one critical element is missing.
How well can you learn to play the violin by watching a violinist
on TV? You see how it is done, which is extremely beneficial, but
the actual playing takes trying it yourself again and again-and
again and again. Couch potatoes may learn the alphabet, but reciting
letters doesn't automatically make them good writers or thinkers.
Consider limiting
the number of activities in which your children participate. A child
who takes piano, saxophone, and dance lessons, sandwiched in with
soccer practices, school play rehearsals, scouts and church activities
may be exposed to a large number of opportunities, but is little
more than a spectator, without time to excel in any of them. It
is during playtime that children assimilate the skills they learn.
They need time to experiment and practice, not merely to take in
new information.
#2: Create
a springboard to imagination.
When I was a
student at BYU, the teacher passed out several sheets of tissue
paper to each of us. Then she announced, "Tonight we are going
to make large tissue paper flowers. Now I don't want to stifle your
creativity, so I'm not going to give you any instructions. Just
be creative, and have fun!"
Well, I didn't
have fun at all. I was frustrated. I vaguely remembered seeing some
of those big crepe paper flowers from Mexico, but try as I might,
I just couldn't picture what they looked like. If the teacher had
only helped us all make one large rose or tulip, I could have learned
the basic principles and then launched out to create my own unique
flower. As it was, my creation turned out very small, and it didn't
look anything like a flower. That night I learned that you can't
create in a vacuum. It is vital to give structured direction and
practice time before you expect anyone to try their own wings.
Just as I needed
one finished flower for a pattern, children need examples to imitate.
That's why they play dress-ups, spacemen, doctor, etc. The most
important role models of all are parents. Little girls copy their
mothers-feeding their dollies, sweeping the floor, fixing dinner.
Little boys follow their dad's lead-using tools to fix a broken
chair, playing cars, building things. If either of these is missing,
it is important to provide substitutes. A few nights ago our two-year-old
granddaughter Christina came over for dinner. She couldn't eat until
her doll was strapped in the high chair and had a bowl on her tray.
She had watched her mother time and time again take care of her
daughter's needs before her own. Children absorb whatever they encounter.
If you are fortunate
enough to have more than one child, encourage them to play together.
There's a synergy between brothers and sisters fostered by similar
background and a non-threatening environment that releases their
imagination. I watched our grandchildren, four-year-old Lucy and
two-year-old Nathan act out the nativity story at Christmas. They
had staged the entire production by themselves. Lucy came riding
into the room on Nathan's back with a bath towel draped over her
head and a doll tucked triumphantly under her arm. Without warning
Nathan stopped crawling and abruptly sprawled on the floor. Lucy
slid off, picked up the baby and announced, "I think my donkey
is tired!"
#3: Introduce children to the magical world of reading.
Reading is one
of the most effective ways to fill the vacuums of life. So much
of reading is fictional and stimulates the imagination. Even informative
reading fills the mind with information to be used creatively. Our
son and his wife have been reading the Harry Potter books to their
four-year-old. She not only understands them, but loves them! She
has drawn a scar on tape and fastened it to her doll's forehead
and made a pair of glasses from paper for the doll to wear.
#4: Use music to set the stage.
Music is a great
way to enhance creativity. Because it is the universal language,
it can set moods more effectively than almost anything. Children
are naturals at singing and dancing. Just add the music, and they
can create the rest. Our daughter Melissa plays music so her young
children can dance every evening after dinner, when it's not quite
bedtime, but the happy edge is wearing thin.
You don't have
to have a great voice to sing with your family. When our first children
were very young, Steve made up a little song as we worked to pick
up the toys. The words were simply, "Job-o, job-o, job-oÝjob"
repeated over and over to a simple tune, but the kids loved it and
soon associated it with tidying up the house. We also composed a
family song. The chorus was, "We love our family. They are
so nice to me. Shawn, Melissa, Dad and Mom, We're happy as can be."
The chorus was followed by a verse for each of us. The children
had fun helping us make up the words, since children love creating
their own songs. Then as each new child was born, we made up a verse
for them.
Our married
son Paul plays the violin. As his daughter Christina (age two) watches
him, she has improvised her own violin. She takes the sound board
off her old walker and tries to hold it under her chin while she
plays the musical sounds on it or has her mother sing "I Am
a Child of God."
#5: Choose toys carefully and limit them.
As the parents
of our first children, we were eager to provide them with every
opportunity for growth and development. So we invested in dozens
of different toys, thinking the variety would be very stimulating
for them. However, sixteen years and twelve children later, we had
discovered something we wished we had known at the beginning: Children
don't really need huge numbers of toys. In fact, too many toys can
actually be a detriment to them. They learn a lot better by improvising
their own. The other day our two-year-old grandson was blissfully
pushing a kitchen spatula around the floor like a car, and one day
several years ago our son David used my bread pans for roller skates.
(The only problem was that the pans still had bread in them!)
There were only
a handful of toys over the years that our children consistently
played with. Other toys were soon discarded. The ones that were
used again and again were those that fostered creativity-Lego blocks,
the little Fisher-Price people, a few cars, a dump truck, dolls,
balls, a push toy, a doctor set, puzzles, scissors, paper, crayons,
and glue.
When I think
back on my own childhood, I don't even remember what toys we had.
We played trains, using the kitchen chairs lined up for seats. We
pretended we were Peter Pan and his friends, leaping from beds or
the porch, trying to fly. We imagined the bed was a boat and that
we couldn't touch the floor, because it was water. When our children
were young, they created a huge maze out of the empty cardboard
boxes after we moved. It was a great novelty for several days. Another
time they gathered up all the pine needles that had fallen in the
yard and outlined a whole village, using piles of pine needles to
mark the boundaries.
#6: Open windows instead of closing doors.
It's easy to
get in the mode of telling our children what they can't do-things
they can't play with, rooms they can't play in, activities they
can't participate in. How much better if we give them ideas of what
they CAN do-suggestions that will spark their imagination.
One of the best
ways to open windows of creativity to children is to pretend with
them. When Christina saw a piece of string on the carpet, she said,
"There's a snake." Instead of saying, "No. That's
just a piece of string," her mom, Mari, said, "That's
a funny snake. What is it doing? Does it need a drink? Where does
it live?" and so on.
We need to remember
that children are people with real feelings. When parents talk about
the funny things their children say or do in front of them, it can
really hurt their feelings or squelch their eagerness to try new
things. On the other hand, praising them in front of others can
build their confidence. We noticed that when our children were little,
the older ones tended to criticize the scribbling of their younger
siblings. We had to teach them that the little ones were doing their
best coloring and needed to be praised.
Whenever someone
wanted ideas for a project, we held a brainstorm session. The children
quickly learned that most of the ideas from such an activity were
not useable. In fact, many of them were downright ridiculous. But
unless you let your imagination go, you never find the really good
ideas. They are usually triggered by the useless ones. Also, one
of the most valuable lessons in brainstorming is that there's no
such thing as a bad idea. It's perfectly fine to have ideas that
don't work. The road to success is generally paved with failures.
When Andrea was young, she had incredible ideas that were totally
impractical. One day I found her crying in her bedroom in frustration.
She had been trying to construct a library for her sister for her
birthday. It included a bed with a built-in bookshelf and a rocking
horse. She was trying to construct it out of paper, tape, and aluminum
foil. It kept collapsing and didn't look anything like what she
pictured. It was a great opportunity to help her learn to balance
her creativity with reality. Turning that failure into success opened
windows that helped her harness her imagination.
A picture-perfect
house can be a sterile environment for creativity. Children-in fact
all of us-need someplace where we can make a mess. Our family room
has been such a place. Because we were never afraid to get it dirty,
it provided lots of opportunities to use our imagination. We pinned
up sheets all around the family room and over the top of the stairs
to make a groundhog hole for Aimee's birthday on Groundhog Day.
We converted it into a rehearsal room for our shows, with mirrors
lining one wall. For Mark's Junior Prom dinner we brought in trees
and logs and covered the ceiling with black paper and painted stars
on it to make a forest. Outside our house there is corner of the
backyard that we never quite got around to finishing. It has been
a paradise for kids. The children have made secret hideouts, schools,
and castles out of old cinderblocks, wood, fence posts, and whatever
else they found lying around.
One more window
all of us need is personal space. Most of us have a hard time trying
new things if we are watched too closely. Children are the same
way. While they need lots of valuable input and supervision, they
also need room to try things on their own. It's important for parents
to back off and stay out of the way, so they can come up with their
own ideas. Several years ago Andrea and Peter made a cassette tape
of a story they created themselves. They experimented to find suitable
sound effects on the synthesizer and disguised their voices to represent
different characters. At one point the witch says, "Hello,
Deary. Would you like a cup of tea?" The boy replies, "No
thanks. We don't drink tea. We're LDS."
#7: Be true
to your dreams.
There's a saying,
"Whatever the human mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve."
And Henry Ford said, "Whether you think you can or you think
you can't, either way you are right." Several years ago I had
the impression that someday our family would sing in Russia. I mentioned
it to a couple of people, and they laughed. At that time Russia
was behind the iron curtain. Our children had sung for a few ward
activities and family home evening, but that was all. I kept my
dreams to myself, but now, just ten years later, we have sung in
Russia. I'm so glad I was true to that dream.
It is doubtful
that anyone ever achieves a dream without running into several brick
walls along the way. Creative problem-solving is a valuable and
vital tool in achieving success. When our family was in Istanbul
at UN Conference five years ago, we faced many such brick walls.
We learned that we were not allowed to enter the UN hall, so we
improvised instead of giving up. We decided to try to sing at the
entrance to the hall instead. First we had to win over the twenty
policemen that stood guard. The children did that by giving them
autographed copies of our cassette tape! When Steve tried to set
up the sound system, he discovered that the electrical outlets didn't
work. We didn't give up, but searched the hotel for someone who
could turn on the power. The next hurdle was time. The delegates
were filing into the hall by now. We said a prayer and powered up
the system, even though there had been no time to test it. It worked!
Then suddenly there was a loud pop and a billow of smoke as the
amplifier went up in flames. For a minute we thought we had been
stopped cold. Suddenly Kenneth Cope, who was with us, grabbed his
guitar. "Sing!" he commanded. We all set down our mics
and sang, as the delegates paused to listen. Afterward we learned
that the UN session following our singing was the most critical
one considering the abortion issue. Through creative problem-solving
and not giving up on our dream, we were able to have a significant
impact on a crucial UN decision.
One of the most
important ways to be true to your dreams is to stop and listen to
them. Turn off the radio, the TV, and the stereo for a few minutes.
Take time to think-and imagine. What is your heart telling you?
At the beginning of the semester Andrea was in a dilemma. Her advisor
and her colleagues all advised her to take a certain curriculum,
which was certain to enhance her professional opportunities, but
Andrea's heart was not in it. She wanted to take Chinese, even though
there was no good reason. I finally said to her, "Andrea, what
is your heart telling you? Maybe you need to listen to your feelings."
She thought a little more about it and changed her schedule. She
absolutely loves her Chinese class. It is the bright spot in her
day. What will she do with it? That remains to be seen, but it is
certain to serve her well, for she has unleashed her imagination.
#8: Open
your mind to God.
"For with
God, nothing is impossible." God is the perfect example of
unleashing imagination. Take the brother of Jared, for example.
The Lord didn't solve his problems for him. Instead, He asked the
brother of Jared what he thought. The brother of Jared decided to
molten sixteen clear stones. It was only after he had done all he
could that the Lord intervened to help him. He did the same in helping
Nephi build a ship. Nephi had to make all the tools, because he
could do that part. The Lord only supplied the knowledge he didn't
have on his own.
One of my favorite
stories is found in Mark 9:23-24. The Savior said to the father
of a lunatic son, "If thou canst believe, all things are possible
to him that believeth." The father cried out with tears, "Lord,
I believe; help thou mine unbelief."
There is an
incredible synergy that comes in using our imagination to the fullest.
When we tap into our inner strength, we not only unleash the power
within us, but connect with the infinite wisdom and power of the
Almighty.
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