At Risk: Our Children's Imagination

http://www.ldsmag.com/familyconnections/091012imagination.html

Developing a healthy imagination in childhood creates the skills in
adulthood necessary to cope with an ever-changing world. So why are
our children constantly being programmed according to someone else's
imagination?
Try this simple experiment at home: Place an ordinary brick on the
kitchen table and tell your children they have exactly two and a half
minutes to list as many uses for the brick as possible. Anything
counts no matter how absurd, ridiculous, or indefensible. As a rough
guide (by no means scientific) a child who comes up with over 30 uses
is creative. More than that, highly creative. OK, I hate categorizing
children, I was tagged with a "learning disability" when I was in
elementary school. What that really meant was the way I learned didn't
conform to the way educators taught. My mother later told me that I
simply had too much imagination and to not worry about what other
people said. Good answer mom.

I was introduced to the brick exercise as a freshman in college, 18
years old. In two and a half minutes I had a list of over fifty uses.
The average in the class was over 30. Today I do the same exercise in
my class of visual arts majors. The average is below 15. And these are
the creative kids. And it seems that every semester they come up with
less and less answers, as if their minds can't untie themselves from
reality.
Why the disparity? Over stimulation comes to mind: video games,
music, texting, facebook, internet surfing, movies, TV, cell phones.
And play time, what do we do with it now? We structure it. We have
play dates where everything is planned. There are no pick-up games of
basketball or baseball or backyard football; we have leagues for that.
Music and art have been eliminated from our schools. Even a casual
visit by a friend is a thing of the past. And parents, wow, they
prowl the hallways in the junior highs making sure their kids are
sitting with the popular group, patrol the sidelines making sure their
kids are getting enough game minutes, and hovering over homework
nudging their children toward the right answer---all because, Heaven
forbid, our children fail and we, the perfect parents, are publicly
humiliated.

The only media I was exposed to as a kid was old black and white
episodes of Tarzan on Saturday mornings. We had long summer days to
catch frogs in the canal, build enormous paper airplanes and launch
them from our garage roof. We played pick-up games of baseball in the
pasture or made up funny games in the basement when it was raining
like bowling with food storage. People my age like to lament the loss
of those days, as if they were somehow better than the days our
children are growing up in. The truth is, our children have it far
better than we did. I remember President Hinckley saying at Conference
a few years ago that we "live in a time of a thousand opportunities."
So if our children have too little imagination, or have abdicated it
to video games; it's our fault.

A few years ago I did some work for the American Toy Institute. Their
slogan is: "The Power of Play." They had done numerous studies on
child development and determined that at the heart of the
well-adjusted child was a fearless imagination. Play to a child is
where they imagine all kinds of situations in a safe, non-punishing
environment. It's where they try on behaviors and learn traits such as
mercy, kindness, assertiveness, forgiveness; not to mention innovation
and problem solving in relationships. In short, they learn to succeed.
But how can this be? Children need structure 24/7, they need
discipline, and they need grown-up mentors to learn those traits.

Says who?

I've never read anything anywhere that says the best thing for our
children is for someone else to make all decisions for them. In fact,
aren't we robbing them of their free agency when we program every
minute of their day? Can you imagine God having so little faith in us?
I recall a plan of total control being pushed aside in favor of
agency. And agency can be fettered by so many forces---media
over-stimulation, to be sure. But also parents who fear the result of
a child left to their own choices. And that brings us back to
imagination---the process of visualizing situations and consequences
without actually engaging in them. Sort of like role playing. Sort of
like wondering. Sort of like wishing. Sort of like dreaming---all of
which are good skills to have as say a scientist, an industrial
designer, a parent…anybody that lives in an unpredictable world and
needs the confidence to adapt, learn and make the best of a real
situation.

When my boys were in junior high school, the three of them were
huddled around the TV with friends playing a video game. It wasn't a
violent game, it wasn't lewd in any way. It was just a video game. I
turned off the game and asked them why they wanted to play somebody
else's game rather than make up their own. "Look," I said. "When you
read a book or build a Roman city out of sticks and boxes or map the
neighborhood with chalk symbols on the sidewalk, you are using your
imagination. When you play a video game you let someone else's
imagination do the work for you." They waited for a minute then
answered: "So?" To which I replied: "So what will happen is eventually
the brain cells that control your ability to communicate will die and
you'll only be able to utter one word sentences and grunts."
"Nuh uhh," they grunted. Suddenly they realized the curse was real.
They ran outside and spent the afternoon building a boxcar out of a
garbage can, scrap wood and whatever discarded wheels they could find.
After crashing into the neighbor's rock garden they modified the
steering. They crashed into the rose garden next. What better thing
for kids to be doing than trying and failing and trying again?
Let me be the first to say media hysteria is to blame for the anxiety
that drives us to don night goggles and follow our children home from
dates, or pick up the extension phone and listen to our six-year old
talk about movies with a friend. When media outlets exploded into a
million channels on cable, internet, and now Twitter; the competition
for advertising dollars drove news folks to search out the
sensational. Admit it; a child abducted in Sweden makes you, the
parent in Northern California, walk your kids home from school for the
next three days; even though they are in high school.
This over-protectedness has driven us to mad levels of control over
our children's lives. There's even a GPS system you can install on
your teenager's car that tells you where they've been. So now you
don't have anything to talk to them about when they get home; you know
where they've been! You just nod, like the all-knowing parent that you
are. From that fabulous 80's movie Footloose, John Lithgow delivers
this great line: "If we don't trust our children, how will they ever
learn how to be trustworthy."

I would add, if we don't allow our children time to exercise their
imagination when they are young, how can we expect them to solve
problems, innovate, achieve greatness when they grow-up.
Imagination. Creativity. Problem Solving. Innovation. Progress. Joy.
If our children are going to experience the greatest joys in this
life, they have to learn how to do the work themselves, learn how to
imagine a better way and figure out how to get there.

It all starts with unstructured time. And that doesn't mean in front
of the TV or with a video game; again that would be letting somebody
else's imagination do the work, and reap all the rewards. It starts
with a blank afternoon, a box of chalk; or 300 paper cups, or a pile
of branches pruned from the apple tree, or just the tree. Add a few
kids, ask a few questions like: what if an alien dressed like a
giraffe was on the roof, what would you make with these old pillow
cases? Then walk away. The kids will be fine. Really.