When it comes to a child’s developmental process, few things can be as crucial to healthy progression as fostering creative thinking. While your child’s imagination and creativity may seem like nothing more than play time, activities that encourage this type of thinking and activity are helping your child to build a solid foundation for innovation and self-confidence. These factors considered, the benefits of creative thinking are quite simply, exponential.

How Creative Thinking Boosts Childhood Development

You may think your child’s imagination activities are an important “break” from learning in a more structured activity like school lessons – and, in a sense, they are – but the truth is, these creative activities are much more crucial to your child’s development than you may realize. Creative activities have so many developmental benefits, including:

• Self-expression – this helps your child learn how to express their feelings and thoughts from an early age.
• Problem-solving – by being allowed to freely explore their creative ideas, children gain valuable problem-solving skills as they try new ideas.
• Curiosity and experimentation – ingenuity is born where curiosity and experimentation are merged, and that begins with creative thinking activities!
• Insight – in addition to helping your child’s development within themselves, creative expression and activities allow parents and teachers to take a unique look inside your child’s mind. This provides an invaluable tool for tailoring teaching techniques and staying in tune with your child’s development and emotions.

Ways to Encourage Creative Thinking

Now that we’ve seen the enormous beneficial gains that come from encouraging free play and creative thinking, let’s take a look at ways in which we can provide ample opportunities for our kids to partake in them. One of the easiest (and most often thought of) ways for children to use creative thinking is with art. Drawing, painting, and coloring provide an excellent medium for kids to express their imaginations and emotions.

While drawing and painting may be the most popular activity to use to encourage creative thinking, it is, by far, not the only form of self-expression. In fact, many children may not show any interest in the activity at all. In order to truly encourage this type of development, it’s imperative that you take the time to truly listen to your child and focus on what does interest them. Creative thinking activities come in many shapes and sizes, such as:

• Modeling clay, putty, play dough, and other moldable mediums for sculpting
• Piano, drums, violin, singing, and any other form of musical play and interpretation
• Hiking, exploring, and nature or history-inspired trips
• Photography
• Chalk drawings (other than traditional paper)
• Shadow puppets and shape experimenting with lights
• Mixed media baskets (allow child to create items on their own with miscellaneous and unrelated objects such as cardboard, paper clips, buttons, etc.)

Long-Term Benefits to Imaginative Play

The possibilities for creative thinking and imaginative play are practically endless. The benefits of such play are equally endless. Foster your child’s ingenuity and build up their self-confidence levels as well as help them to develop healthy forms of self-expression with one simple activity: creative thinking.