How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

I may be biased from my own experience, but I remember being incredibly frustrated at a young age from the lack of help understanding things I was "too young" for. My role models and teachers made zero efforts to help me learn analog circuit design and my first programming language, Perl. This made it much harder than it would have been if I was attending actual classes, and probably set back my understanding many years.

I'm not sure how much of an outlier I am, but our education system is not built for creative types. It's too hard to get placed in anything significantly above your grade level, especially if your brilliance is restricted to a single subject. I remember showing an bistable flipflop design to my science teacher in 5th grade and getting a puzzled "that's nice Johnny" type look when I wanted help figuring out why my breadboard version wouldn't oscillate. A few of my skills were so beyond what anyone expected that they didn't know what to do with me, or what they were even looking at, so they did nothing.

It took another eleven years before I had contact with any teachers that matched my experience level with programming and circuit design. During that time I advanced my skills slightly, but not having any peers made me an outcast and certainly left me far behind where I could have been.

Backing off is a bad idea. You need to take your child's curiousity and do everything you can to keep it alive. I'm sure a lot of kids started out like me but eventually let their dreams die.

2) This falls into the just world fallacy. Intelligence does not seem to come with real drawbacks. Highly intelligent people often have upper end reflexes, are unusual attractive, highly creative, social, and or content. They are more often taller and live longer as well.

The trappings of intelligence are different, but very high raw intelligence is seen across most walks of life including actors, athletes, and salesmen.

Good point about Feynman. The only thing I've found to work is trying everything until something starts to work. Of course, you start with the books to get ideas for what to try next. Ive got one of those kids that bounces off the walls. The older I get though the less I care. Some kids just can't sit still. Kids are society's problem and when we don't build spaces for them to be kids, its gonna happen.

My son is only 8 months old, so we’ll see how it goes, but my intention is to give him lots of freedom to define what he wants to learn about and work on, but then help provide lots of structure and support for actually doing the work, and making sure it gets pushed all the way to a quasi-finished state.

The thing I was most disappointed about in my own schooling was that I got very little support or time to do serious medium- or large-scale projects, and I got very little mentorship or instruction about the subjects I most cared about personally.

Even in a very good public school district, and then at a very good college, most of what I learned about my own research interests was learned entirely from books and my own experimenting, while most of the work I did felt like pure make-work for the convenience of my teachers.

I feel that it was partly because school only ever provided bite-sized assignments with prescribed subject and scope that I still don’t feel like I have mastered the skill of motivating myself to keep working bit by bit at larger-scale projects.

I wound up with lots of creative ideas, and a fine ability to do specific narrow small tasks, or to do tedious polishing work, but a serious “writer’s block” kind of problem when it comes to diving into the meat of large projects.

Being a good parent is becoming an increasing concern of mine as I am reaching an age where I could probably get married in some parts of the world. Its giving me anxiety, wanting to be not a shitty father...

Digression aside:

> Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it’s easy to thwart.

There are many parents though that do just to opposite by not backing off no? This is sort of generalizing, but kids from Asian countries are a great counterpoint to this. With that in mind, couldn't we also amend that theory, and add culture as a factor?

Furthermore, isn't it also the case that since kids are getting into school earlier than they used to (say 50 or so years ago; random number, don't goto imright.com and disprove it xD), wouldn't they be more susceptible to other kids/teachers? I mean now a days parents see their kids less than their teachers. They basically work 9-5 just like adults.

Addendum: Forgot which famous book this is from: But appraising a child for their hardwork over natural talent is one of the best things we can do. So to that end, creativity should be garnered as something one has to work towards. Man.. I can't wait to test all this shit on my kids.. (obviously joking)

Edit: Change wording and add more meaningful question.