Maintaining a playful attitude in life

A parenting class Tyce and I took while attending BYU's Education Week, was by Andrew S. Brimhall, called "The Power of Play."  Pablo Picasso once said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”  Many artists have quoted similar beliefs, expressing that we are all born with creativity, and we are "educated," or grown out of, as we age.

A great resource that was mentioned was a website (found here) where lectures from Ken Robinson can be accessed.  Robinson speaks about a child's creativity, stating "if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."  Robinson believes this is one of the major problems with adult creativity - they have experienced embarrassment or feeling like a "failure," and so they stop their unique flow of creativity, in fear of being "wrong."

Especially in today's competitive society where children are enrolled in music, swimming, and gymnastic classes at an extremely young age, the time to find their own motivation for creativity is smothered (most times, to death).  When we over-organize our child's time, in Stuart Brown's words, "we may be depriving them of access to an inner motivation for an activity that will later blossom into a motive force for life."

The message that really hit us was to do what a child would want to do - think about how fun it would be to play, rather than "the mess."  This would not only enable our children to be more creative, it would also allow us to enjoy the messy, curious, exciting part of life again.  Easier said than done, perhaps, but I think it helped motivate us to bring more art into our home and create opportunities where Lincoln has time to play and create whatever it is he wants!