Innovative adults were first creative kids.
What skills do children need to become innovative adults? Turns out American and Chinese parents don’t agree. According to a Newsweek survey, 45% of Chinese parents marked creative approaches to problem solving as their number one answer, but only 18% of American parents agreed.
Responses as to whether math and computer skills drive innovation were even more surprising. Just 9% of the Chinese parents placed that those skills as important, whereas it was the number one answer for American parents (52%).
So what’s up with American parents? Are we so immersed in our current academic-based curriculums that we no longer value creative thinking?
As parents, we don’t have to wait for educational standards to shift to foster creative thinking. In fact, we can cultivate that right in our very own homes.
Here are a few suggestions to get kids thinking creatively.
1. Present easy science experiments.
• Discover if different liquids (including those like shampoo) change when beaten with an electric mixer.
• Think of a variety of unusual places to store balloons in (e.g. refrigerator, clothes hamper) for a week and then compare how they look.
• Determine whether it’s possible to prevent water from freezing by mixing a different ingredient (e.g. salt, baking soda, sugar) into the water of each ice tray section.
2. Give kids opportunities to engage in whacky activities.
• Dress up furniture with articles of clothing.
• Plan and host a birthday party for a favorite stuffed animal.
• Participate in a family backwards hour (i.e. everything is backwards—clothing, names, order that dinner is served, etc.)
3. Throw out creative thinking challenges.
• Create a new cookie that has at least one novel ingredient (e.g. pretzels? orange slices?)
• Figure out different ways to paint with an ice cube (e.g. sprinkle jello powder on paper lining a baking pan and then rotate the cube from side to side).
• Invent an original bubble-making machine (e.g. use common objects to replace traditional wands and power the bubbles with a fan).
Having trouble thinking of more ideas to introduce? Well, once you open this door, your child is probably the best resource for thinking of new activities. Other parents are also good resources. So share! What are some simple creative activities that you’ve done with your child?
The cortex parent uses analysis instead of fear to make H1N1 vaccine decisions.
Is the H1N1 vaccine safe for kids? That’s usually the fear-based headline we see, and it’s intended to trigger a knee-jerk reaction from those for and against the vaccine. It’s also the kind of headline that sells a lot more newspapers than those that say: “An Analysis of the H1N1 Vaccine.”
Yet the cortex parent does just that. We begin this analytical process by temporarily forgetting everything we think we already know about H1N1. That way, we can truly be open to whatever information we acquire.
Next, we ask questions and seek answers to them from both sides. Since unbiased reporting is kinda rare today, we need to go to sources beyond the ones we ordinarily rely on. Otherwise, we’ll only likely get a diluted (at best) version of the “other side.”
Here are some possible questions when exploring H1N1 vaccine safety:
Once we’ve gathered all the information — from as many diverse sources as possible — we’re now ready to ask a question that’s more inclusive than just whether the H1N1 vaccine is safe for kids. Instead we ask: Which has more overall risk for my child: the H1N1 flu or the H1N1 vaccine?
Guess what? It’s very possible that parents from different families will come to opposite conclusions. But even thought their final answer may differ from each other, such parents still have this in common: Their decisions were based on solid cortical reasoning versus a fear-based reaction — and that’s always the goal of the cortex parent.
