Another Saturday morning. Mom hangs laundry on the line by the big pine tree. Dad made a clothesline that stretches from the tree all the way down our backyard hill.
I know! I’m going to bake a cake for Mom and Dad!
I grab my bucket and shovel—the ones Dad gave me when we went to the beach—and run to the front yard, to my special spot under the bush with the white flowers. I fill the bucket about halfway with dirt, then run into the kitchen for a glass of water. Carefully, I carry it with two hands, back outside, pour it into the bucket, and stir.
And stir some more. It needs something. This is too plain. I grab a handful of grass from the lawn, squish it up, and throw it into the mix. Finally. Just right.
I pick up the blob of magical ingredients and pat it into a ball, just like Mom does when she makes meatloaf. Except this isn’t meatloaf. This is a cake.
I place it carefully on a dish, pick a white blossom from the bush, and set it on top.
There! A cake for Mom and Dad, I think, smiling proudly at my masterpiece.
I don’t remember what Mom and Dad said when I presented them with my creation. But I remember making mud pies. Lots and lots of mud pies.
All these years later, I find myself thinking about that happy little kid, hair up in two ponytails on the top of her head, sitting and “creating” in the dirt.
No one had to teach her that dirt could become cake batter, grass could become some mysterious ingredient, or a flower could be the finishing touch. No one had to explain imagination to her.
She simply saw possibilities. Children do that.
Researchers have a name for one part of what is happening here: divergent thinking. Put simply, it means coming up with different ideas and possibilities rather than immediately searching for the one “right” answer. Researchers have studied it for decades, and studies show that even very young children can already do this kind of thinking.
But I keep coming back to a different question.
In teaching children how the world works, are we sometimes inadvertently teaching them to stop imagining how else it could work?
Of course, children need us to teach them. There really are right answers sometimes. They need to learn rules and boundaries that keep them safe. They need knowledge and guidance as they make their way into the world.
But sometimes we adults are a little too quick to provide the answer.
Think about a child who draws a purple tree. Our adult instinct may be to say, “Trees aren’t purple.” We know what color trees are, and perhaps we think we’re helping the child get it right. But what if we resisted the urge to correct her and simply asked, “Tell me about your purple tree.” Maybe it’s purple because she loves purple. Maybe it’s a magical tree. Maybe she saw a tree at sunset that really did look purple. Or maybe there is no reason at all. Does it matter? The tree doesn’t need to be green. Not yet. For this moment, perhaps we can simply let the child show us what she sees.
This is one reason I keep returning to the importance of open-ended play. When children play without an adult deciding what the finished product should look like, they get to experiment. They make things up. They try something, change their minds, tear it apart, and start again. A blanket becomes a fort. A stick becomes a magic wand. A cardboard box becomes a playhouse.
And dirt and water become a cake for Mom and Dad.
There is something else worth remembering. The children we are raising today will inherit problems we cannot solve for them. They will face questions for which no answer conveniently waits in the back of a book. They will need knowledge, certainly. But they will also need the ability to imagine something that doesn’t exist yet.
Perhaps that is why we should be careful with this wonderful capacity children bring with them.
Our job isn’t only to teach children what we know. Maybe part of our job is to protect their willingness to wonder about what we don’t know.
The next time a child comes up with an answer that seems ridiculous, invents a new use for an old object, or creates something that makes absolutely no sense to us, perhaps we can wait a moment before correcting.
We might simply ask, “Tell me more.”
Because children see possibilities we have forgotten to see.
And sometimes, if we’re willing to listen, they may help us see them again.
For Those Who Want to Dig Deeper
Bai, H., Mulder, H., Moerbeek, M., Kroesbergen, E., & Leseman, P. (2021). “Divergent thinking in four-year-old children: An analysis of thinking processes in performing the Alternative Uses Task.” Thinking Skills and Creativity, 40, 100814. This study examined how four-year-olds come up with unusual uses for familiar objects and found that young children already use different thinking processes to generate original ideas.
Bai, H., Mulder, H., Moerbeek, M., Leseman, P. P. M., & Kroesbergen, E. H. (2023). “The development of divergent thinking in 4- to 6-year-old children.” Creativity Research Journal, 36(4), 656-674. Researchers followed 107 children beginning at age four for a year and a half, repeatedly asking them to think of unusual uses for ordinary objects. The study offers a fascinating look at how divergent thinking develops during early childhood.
Vaisarova, J., & Carlson, S. M. (2021). “When a spoon is not a spoon: Examining the role of executive function in young children’s divergent thinking.” Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 25, 100161. In studies of children ages four to six, researchers found that younger children sometimes generated more or more original ideas when objects were unfamiliar to them—a particularly interesting finding when we consider how knowing what something is “supposed” to be may shape what else we imagine it could be.
Kleibeuker, S. W., De Dreu, C. K. W., & Crone, E. A. (2013). “The development of creative cognition across adolescence: distinct trajectories for insight and divergent thinking.” Developmental Science, 16(1), 2–12. This study reminds us that creativity doesn’t simply disappear as children grow older. Different forms of creative thinking follow different developmental paths.
