Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy free time, creativity and imagination

This is cracking me up, I always cringed at all the plastic crap my kids would get from relatives at Christmas and birthdays. Somehow though, I think many kids are innately programmed to be creative despite sometimes stifling parenting, and all the plastic junk. Several examples come to mind beyond the common experience of the kid preferring to play with the cardboard box than with whatever came inside it.

One summer we stayed at a hotel while visiting grandma, grandma showered the girls with really nice expensive dolls and toys but my 2 year-old spent the whole time playing with the little shampoo bottles from the hotel bath, she gave them names and personalities and made clothing for them out of the wrapping paper from the gifts. I asked her later why she preferred the shampoo bottles to the pretty dolls and she explained that she could make them be whatever/whoever she wanted to whereas the dolls were already "done" by someone else and that was no fun.

Another time I tried to organize my kids room: I bought neat under-bed boxes for each toy type and told my girls I expected them to pick one thing to play with at a time and put it away before taking out another box. After nap-time (my nap-time) I was appalled to finad that they had everything out at once. I demanded an explanation and they showed me their masterpiece, explaining that in order to play with Barbies, they needed the blocks to build the palace for Barbie's ball, the legos were absolutely necessary to make colorful furniture for inside the palace, colored construction paper was required for fancy rugs and of course the remote control tonka truck was required to bring Barbie to the palace in style, oh, and dress up jewelry had to be used to decorate the palace if it was to be believable...etc etc(!)

Another day I opened the girls bedroom door and found the whole room (wall to wall and floor to ceiling fan) had been turned into a giant 3 dimensional spider web with the knitting yarn tied around absolutely everything, my 3 yr old had worked on it all night and was very proud of herself. Since the little one never slept more than 4 hours a night, I guess she had more than enough free time no matter how much structure I crammed into the day.

We woke one morning when my son was 3 or 4 to find a similar structure extending all the way from our front door to our back door and covering half the width of the house. It was composed of long intertwined strands of tractor-feed printer paper chads. He had painstakingly separated them from 4 reams of paper. He explained that it was a burglar alarm system since you couldn't open a door or window or walk through the house without tearing at least one of the perforated strands, and the noise would alert us to the danger.

Ah, well after reading the article's definition of creativity, you win since your son's project actually had some "usefulness" to it ;-)

If that's what creativity is then I don't like it at all. Recently my boy dumped his sister's whole bottle of baby powder on the Christmas tree to make snow.

How did the cleaning go?

Just popped back to say, nah. We really love our free time. Didnt start it for the creativity angle, never thought about it till this thread. Won't be angling for it either. We went to collect rocks to peer through the loupe today. It's fun just hanging out.

When I was 6 I used my mom's contact lenses to finish my model car's headlights. This was back when they were REALLY expensive.

She was and was not amused.

I was wondering how much free time does the typical 5 or 6 year old get every week? To clarify, I include in this definition any unstructured activity (not led by adults), such as the play time in the pool with friends or on playdates or unstructured kid events where they run around wild. We homeschool and it feels like we have way too much creative play time, LOL, and could use at least a little more of that "Chinese mom" approach.

Mine is at school, not riding the bus. There's about an hour between waking and leaving for school, then four hours between school and bed. 2 1/2 of those hours are taken up with getting ready for school or bed or eating, so 2 1/2 hours a day free on a weekday, then all day Saturday and Sunday. They get some free time at school (it's kindergarten) about 1 1/2 hours a day.

About the same for my six-year-old, except she does gymnastics and dance class (two hours per week total). She walks 50 feet from school to dance class, and gymnastics is two blocks from school, so no time is lost to driving (this is deliberate on our part).

Oh, homework time is minimal.

Build a fort with cardboard boxes. It is cool. from DS10