You single-handedly keep Crayola in business; you shell out for piano, dance and drama lessons; you visit every museum, family concert and puppet show in town. So your child’s right brain is in good hands – right? Perhaps not as good as you think.

Parents often miss everyday opportunities to foster their child’s creative thinking skills. Or even worse, they unknowingly squelch creativity altogether – and with it the potential for tomorrow’s scientists, engineers, researchers and entrepreneurs to lead the future.

So what did Mozart’s mom know that we don’t?

One of my favorite mommy moments sparked from a playground “fight” my then 3-year-old daughter Samantha had with a playmate. Emily’s mom rushed over to mediate, then told the girls to “shake hands.” Emily promptly held out her hand, while Samantha began to wave her hands wildly back and forth. She was shaking hands, just in her own creative way.

“The art table isn’t the only place for children to practice creativity,” says Mark Kent, director of education at Imagine It! The Children’s Museum of Atlanta. “A child can be creative in the way they approach science or sports, even how they clean their room. Nurturing creativity is about encouraging exploration of all possibilities – not just violin lessons.”

And that’s where so many parents, including myself, have a hard time – creativity incognito. We can’t nurture what we don’t recognize. But we can too easily choke it in the name of parental duty. Parents often view kids’ creative exploration as dawdling or even disruption, something that needs correction. Out of love, we want to tell them how the world works, keep them on task and get them to dance class on time. Out of love – and perhaps a bit of ego – we parent for the “A.”

Even if they don’t grow up to become Picassos, children benefit from creative thinking skills as they mature. “Crushing a child’s ability to create creates an inhibited child who sees the world with tunnel vision,” says Amanda Morton, a first- and second-grade music teacher at Woodward North and lead coach of the school’s Odyssey of the Mind team. “They would more likely find it easier to follow the crowd instead of leading the way.”

Children who are encouraged in their creativity, on the other hand, grow into adults who blaze their own trails, Morton says. “Long-term repercussions of actively cultivating a child’s creativity will result in an adult who will be able to channel an abundant amount of creativity into every aspect of their lives – from work to home to relationships.”

A More Creative Approach

So have you unknowingly created a creativity crisis?
I have too. But I’m resolving in ’06 to provide a warmer climate for my children’s creativity: asking why before telling how; evaluating ideas in terms of cause and effect. And most importantly, I resolve to be on the lookout for my kids’ brainstorming cues. Challenging? A little – but I’ll never get mentioned in their Nobel or Oscar acceptance speech if I don’t start now.

Are we unknowingly killing our children’s creativity – and more importantly, how can we stop? Psychologist Teresa Amabile, a Harvard Business School professor and noted creativity researcher, has identified six main creativity killers:

1. Surveillance

Constant hovering over children, making them feel watched, can cause imagination stage fright. The creator needs personal space to explore, take risks, make mistakes and change direction. Every superhero battle shouldn’t be a Kodak moment. There is a reason kids lose interest once the video is rolling. If they want you at the tea party, they will ask – but understand why they may not.

2. Valuation

In business, an idea is only valuable if it works. In childhood, there are no creative misfires, for it’s the process not the product that matters. What valuation really means is to bite your tongue. Let a Valentine be orange with dinosaurs, a too-tall block tower fall (again), and a pine derby car have lopsided wheels. Be your child’s cheerleader always, but his coach only when asked. A child who worries how others judge what he is doing won’t push open the box. Self-satisfaction, however, drives more creation.

“One of the most common mistakes I see parents make is correcting them for answers that are really just different ways of viewing something or saying something,” Morton says. “Parents need to understand that the way their child views things is a unique personality trait that sets their child apart from the rest. In fact, listening to their make-believe and joining in will further spark their creativity and create great memories between parent and child.”

3. Rewards & Competition

Recognize but do not specifically reward creative thinking. Research shows rewards actually interfere with the creative process. Incentives motivate ideas, but not as many original ones. Authentic exploration stops after all possibilities have been tried. When the goal becomes the good grade, there is less motivation to explore beyond the first right answer.

Win/lose situations also defeat creativity. Creative spirit is about playing vs. final score. Children need permission to progress at their own rate, taking pride in their own ideas. Parents need to muzzle their own competitive spirit. For example, I was quite proud of my son’s Western-themed bedroom, with it’s stylish comforter, matching lamp and wrought-iron mirror. “But I don’t like cowboys, Mommy,” he said. And I hadn’t bothered asking him for fear he might pick an ugly licensed character. His room is now “sports” themed – a hodge-podge of trophies, sports banners and a not-so-sophisticated comforter, all picked and enjoyed by him.

4. Over-control

Telling children exactly how to do something of a creative nature also tells them exploration is a waste of time and originality is wrong. Perhaps you are familiar with Henry Chapin’s classic, “Flowers are Red,” which tells the demise of a child’s imagination at the hands of a teacher who insists, “Flowers are red, green leaves are green…There’s no need to see flowers any other way…than the way they always have been seen.”

According to Kent, “the coloring example” is a classic case of a well-intending adult ignoring a child’s creativity. A child has a coloring sheet featuring a tree outline, and thus grabs purples, pinks, blues and begins to color all over the page. The adult tries to “teach” the child that coloring is done inside the lines and with correct tree colors. The adult never considers that the child might be using colors that she wanted trees to be, or maybe she was actually using colors and lines that reflected the tree’s movement or mood.

Despite good intentions, the adult “taught” that being original is not acceptable.

This stifling of spontaneous creativity happens in more mundane ways as well: insisting that blue socks don’t match yellow dresses, that the holiday star must be displayed atop the tree, or that peanut butter can’t go on a turkey sandwich. “Actively look for opportunities for your child to fill in the blanks,” Kent says.

5. Pressure

The performance of 73 percent of all Major League Baseball rookies of the year declines during their second season. We make trivia games of one-hit wonders, but their quick burnout speaks to a highly destructive creativity killer – grand expectations. Type A parents anticipate Type A accomplishment from a child who shows creative “promise.” Amabile warns that too-intensive training can result in a total distaste for the talent being cultivated.

6. Time

The deadliest of all creativity killers is something so obvious, it’s not. Time. Children need blocks of uninterrupted, open-ended time. Time for what psychologists call “flow” – the ultimate state of creativity, in which a person becomes so completely absorbed in an activity that he or she loses all sense of time.

As a parent you know how easily children flow into flow. Yet we typically interrupt them to move on to the next activity. Many parents have an irrational fear of allowing a child to become bored. In reality, boredom drives fantasy and imagination. Says Morton, “I see children going from piano to gymnastics to soccer on a daily basis. These children don’t have any free playtime. They don’t have enough time to daydream or create.”

Over-scheduling is a tired topic – but I’ll still refer to our multi-task culture that devalues under-scheduled time. Not just for our children, but for ourselves.

And that’s where the real truth lies. The No. 1 creativity killer for children is parents’ lack of undivided attention to really listen: to pick up on and run with kids’ creative cues. Kids constantly invite brainstorming, but adults are often too preoccupied with their own ideas to hear.

Most parents don’t always have or take the time to treat children’s unusual questions with proper respect. It’s quicker and easier to provide an answer than to answer with a question that encourages further thinking. We all dismiss ready opportunities to brainstorm with children. Typical example: “I wish we could fly over this traffic,” my daughter reports. “We’ll be there soon; would you like to hear Kids Bop?” I respond. Another Big Idea lost somewhere on Ga. 400.