Creativity in Action

I will admit that our kids have a lot of unstructured time. I am not a believer in the over-scheduling of children and carting them off from one activity to another. It seems like the typical family anymore just goes from one thing to the next. It's very normal for the parents to always have to split themselves between the kids and go from soccer to baseball to karate to dance to boy scouts and on and on. The kids hardly have time to get home and grab a bite to eat before heading out to the next scheduled activity, if they even eat at home at all. Then, after all that, they come home and have to do their homework. I don't think that any of those activities are bad in and of themselves, but I also don't believe in the benefit of having so much going on at one time all the time. There are several reasons why I'm not a fan of it, but the one that comes to mind right now is that I don't think that kids have enough opportunities to be bored...and, therefore, to be creative. I don't mean that it's good for kids to sit around saying that they don't have anything to do. I mean that when they don't have anything to do, that's when they use their imaginations and come up with amazing things.

Jake and Addi are constantly coming up with new games to play and new things to do...things that I shake my head at and wonder where in the world they possibly got the idea. The majority of our time is spent at home, but they don't have TV to watch and hardly any computer time, so they really don't have a choice but to be creative. They argue a lot in the process, but they also have a great time together. This afternoon, they decided that they were going to try to create invisible ink using lemons and I'm not sure what else. This then turned into them attempting to create natural dyes (their words, not mine) from flowers and plants and anything they could find in nature. They kept running in and out of the house getting hot water and various "tools" to pound up their flowers and create their dye. The next thing I knew they were finding old t-shirts to dye, white yarn, and whatever else they could come up with that they thought I would allow them to use. This went on for at least a couple of hours and the whole time they were laughing, creating, and having a great time together. They would never get the opportunity to do things like that though if we constantly had places to be, and they would miss out on what I think is such an important part of childhood.

Here are a few snapshots of their creative afternoon...