Raising Creative kids: Why Creativity is Important and Practical Ways to Encourage Creativity

October 27, 2025

Today I want to share why creativity is important for life and some practical ways to engage your child’s creative thinking.

Raising Creative Kids: Why is Creativity so Important?

I used to think that creative thinking was important just to people who work in the creative arts fields such as music, studio art, landscape design, etc., but the more I grow as a mom and educator, I’m realizing that creative thinking plays a profound impact in any child’s education, no matter what field of work he someday enters.

There is a close link between creative thinking and problem solving as creative thinking is essentially the ability to see a need and construct something useful to fulfill that need. Creativity can see a hurdle (i.e. such as a new piece of violin music) and construct a pathway to accomplishing the mission (i.e. proficiently learning the music through disciplined practice). By developing our children’s creative thinking, we are helping them to build their problem-solving skills which they will need for personal and professional life.

When we give our children age-appropriate creative outlets, they are able to explore options and discover possible solutions for a variety of situations. We are then giving them the personal tools in their "life toolboxes" to handle the difficulties of life such as perseverance, resilience, spatial thinking, understanding of cause and effect, and so on.

In our world today, so much creative thinking is already done for our children, but we as parents need to wisely reclaim the space and opportunity for our children to think on their own.  Instead of constantly handing our children the answers or giving them something partially completed already, we need to hold back the parental wave of temptation to do everything for our kids.

I’d like to use the classic coloring book as an example of what I mean by reclaiming creativity for our children. The traditional coloring book has beautiful pictures, full of perfectly shaped people, places, and things. All our kids have to do is fill in the space with color and voila! some beautiful art. But is it really their art?

Instead of giving a child a coloring book, how about giving them an artist-quality sketch pad and a pack of colored pencils? This fresh opportunity gives them the ability to explore their own minds and develop their own spatial thinking and artistry. (For the record, I’m not against coloring books. This is just an example…although my kids have never gotten into coloring books.)

When we give our children a “blank palette” through a variety of resources and opportunities, we are allowing them to freely explore and develop their own thinking. By discovering how life works in their own ways and time, life-long knowledge and skills will stick with our children in ways that pre-digested materials usually do not.

So how can we offer our children meaningful creative outlets? I’d like to share a few ways that our family tries to encourage creative thinking in our home and on our property.

 

Raising Creative Kids: Demonstrating Creativity Myself

One of the best ways that my husband and I have found to teach our children creativity is to demonstrate our own creativity to them. I’m definitely more the “artsy” type with my music, home décor, and other ventures within obvious sight. My husband’s creativity is a little less known to my children right now as he engineers high level business solutions and strategizes cyber security operations, but I hope someday our kids will understand just how creative their daddy is. For now, the kids see his creativity in projects such as building a fort, constructing a homemade “play” chainsaw and weedwhacker, tree work, and gardening.

The main point is that our children are watching us and hopefully learning from us. They see us encounter problems and how we react to them. They watch us as we strategize possible solutions. They watch us fail. They watch us make messes and mistakes. But hopefully they see us persevering in life and with the Lord’s wisdom, coming to solutions for a variety of problems.

Raising Creative Kids: Hands-On Ways to Encourage Creativity

Outside Play

Our yard will never win the “Most Beautiful Yard” award due to kid-friendly (and less than attractive) structures, but our children are worth the aesthetic sacrifice. Our yard plays a huge part in our children’s creative development.

“Palletice”—What was meant to be a picket fence around mom’s garden turned into a massive and oh-so-fun palace ready for climbing, pretending, cooking, hiding, and any other crazy activity a child’s mind can conceive. My husband took a bunch of pallets and screwed them together into various rooms and little kid-sized nooks.

A place to dig—We have a huge burn pit in our yard which is simply a big hole in the ground, probably left by a contractor decades ago. This may seem like an odd place to play, but our kids have played in this hollowed out spot for hours. The freedom to dig has opened many creative outlets ranging from harvesting dirt to add to garden spots to tractors working on the “job site.” In case you are worried, the kids don’t go near when we actually use the pit to burn yard debris.

Woods—Who can describe the happiness of romping through the woods as a child? Or building a little house in the woods amongst trees? There is no limit to creative play in even a small patch of woods. We love the woods on the fringes of our yard and are thankful to neighbors granting permission to extend play onto their land.

Fort—For many months, my husband has faithfully worked on building a sturdy, indestructible “treeless tree house” for our kids. The fort is essentially a 10x10 deck raised about 8 feet in the air. My husband, Jesse, still has some work to do such as building a staircase and tying the structure in with our existing playset, but the kids are already in full play on this structure.

Craft and Art Play

We try to give our children as many supplies and art mediums as possible for creating. Here are some supplies that we try to keep on hand for our kids.

Art supplies—Our children have a variety of art supplies available to them whenever they want to create: playdoh, stamps, colored pencils, paint, colored paper, scissors, crayons, glue, etc. Almost every day, my children can be found drawing a picture with simply a pencil and paper.

Wood and nails—There is something so satisfying about pounding a nail into a piece of wood. With guidance, we give our children the opportunity to use a child-sized hammer to pound away.

Sewing supplies—A bag of fabric scraps, ribbon, yarn, etc. can be the start of wonderful projects.

Gardening resources—Each of our children has a personal raised garden bed, and they delight in seeing the growing process first hand.

Kitchen opportunities—I try to welcome our kids into the kitchen as much as possible. My goal is for them to (someday) have free reign of the kitchen when they are responsible enough.

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The above ideas are a mere handful of the creative opportunities we could give our children, but I hope you feel inspired to create something yourself and also help your kids get into creating!

It’s okay if kids feel a little stumped or even bored. Kids who haven’t had many opportunities for open creativity may need some time just to get bored and start thinking on their own, but that’s the start of something beautiful…

Happy creating!

-Ashley

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