Are kids more creative than adults? Of course they're not! How did such an absurd idea ever get started anyway?
Kids aren't wired yet. They're the seed not the fruit. Who wants to be a seed?
Really, if kids are so creative then how come they're so messy?
Maybe they just can't imagine the future, even if it's only an hour later, when they'll have to live with the consequences of their mess.
I think what kids are good at is storing vivid memories of pleasant times, memories that will come in useful when they become creative adults.
Kids are all anxious to become adults and who can blame them? Kids are tribal, are quick to ridicule other kids who don't conform, and are especially vulnerable to trends and fads. Does that sound creative to you?
Now adults on the other hand...like (ahem!) me...that's different.
Adults are fine and noble chaps! They're good conversationalists. You can talk to an adult. You can reason with them! And the ideas! They have SUCH ideas!
I think the reason why kids' creativity is so over-rated is that they make bold drawings on art projects. Maybe that's because they don't have to pay for the pigments. If I were to think about making a bold, red background like the one above I'd be calculating the cost. Kids don't have to do that.
One last point: people are always saying that kids are born creative and society knocks it out of them. Is there any evidence for that? The reason playfull kittens turn into sleepy adults probably has nothing to do with the way cats are socialized. Aren't they just playing out their biology? Maybe human kids are doing the same thing.
Don't get me wrong about all this, I love kids even if they're a bit spaced-out. They're cute little buggers aren't they?
Yeah Kids are Stupid, but gosh darn they are precious. Reminds me of all the kid's I draw caricatures for at Sea World, they'd ask "Are you an Artist?" I'd say "no I'm Batman" and they'd say "Nooo....really?...noooo.."
ReplyDeleteTwo things I can think of:
ReplyDeleteWhen people say more creative, maybe they mean less inhibited. They can play and imagine more freely than most adults.
Maybe you are thinking of the wrong adults. Think about Programming executives.
not sure but this video on the TED page http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66 might have a different view on this.
ReplyDeleteSir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
..as for the comment " a kid would not paint that red background if he had to pay for the paint" yeah that is the quickest way to kill creativity is start thinking about cost of supplies, ouch-I wish I could forget that part myself.
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ReplyDeleteI know some kids that are way smarter than some adults and some that are more creative as well. Wasn't there this gameshow where it had these children do these academic testings against older men in their 40's and 50's? I think on one of the first shows the kids beat the adults. I think this show is called,"Are You Smarter Than a 5th?" (I just looked it up on Google). I don't have cable so I don' t know.
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying it applies to all kids or anything, but one of the things in my life that got me to grow and desire to become an artist was that it was my best subject and skill that I had and that I beat most adults that I knew at it. I'm sure that's what it was with a lot of us. After all talent is an extraordinary gift especially for an artist. It's superhuman in a sense or having a superpower in my opinion. Talent is just something you're born with and perfect later as an adult.
It's like how some kids can beat certain adults at cooking but that's because they were talented and had a passion for it and naturally worked harder at it than certain unskilled adults. Just my 2 cents.
Thanks for the interesting article Eddie.
12:24 AM
....they'd ask "Are you an Artist?" I'd say "no I'm Batman" and they'd say "Nooo....really?...noooo.."
ReplyDeleteAhahaha...now, that's a great line. :D
My take on it is that kids are less afraid of ridicule or perceived failure than adults are.
ReplyDelete"I want to wear the red pants with the loud pink top." And so I do, without any regard to what anyone else might think.
Eddie, I agree. Kids are amazing -- at being kids. The rate at which they grow and learn is literally staggering. But this is almost the opposite of creativity: it is receptivity. Kids absorb things remarkably well, which is just what they are supposed to be doing. To say that they are uniquely creative is to praise them for the wrong thing.
ReplyDeleteIt's also obviously false, at least if you specify that creativity means creating something good. Mozart was a great prodigy, but he created none of his great works of his that we listen to today when he was a kid. Mendelssohn, a greater prodigy than even Mozart, created exactly one masterpiece while he was a kid (actually, a teenager): The Midsummer Night's Dream Overture (the rest of the MND music was composed later).
I have no memory of this myself, but my mother told me about visiting my kindergarten class to look at all our drawings. Some kids drew simple things like 'a bunny', 'my house', 'my dog', etc. My picture was always a big scribbley mess that noone could make head nor tail of. The teacher would have to call me over to explain what they were looking at. My explanation would then be that of an energetic scene where say a house caught on fire and then some firefighters showed up to put out the fire........ and there would be many other things going on at once as well.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if that sort of thing made me more or less creative, but I sure stood out from the other kids with that.
"Mozart was a great prodigy, but he created none of his great works of his that we listen to today when he was a kid."
ReplyDeleteHey Lester- I beg to differ. I think Twinkle, Tinkle Little Star/ the ABC's is a pretty great song that he wrote when he was like age five, no?
Having worked with children much more than I'd like, I gotta agree with ya on pretty much everything here, Eddie.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing I'll add is that I think a bigger part of why people believe kids are so creative is just that they're not expected (and are, in most cases, incapable) of applying any fundamental drawing skills. So the black crayon scrawl looks creative, when it's really just a bad drawing of Batman.
Kali, I think we are using different senses of "great" here. I was thinking of artistic masterpieces like the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture.
ReplyDeleteThat photo of the kid with the paint bucket sent a cold chill through my very soul. I have a 3-1/2 year old and this is a very possible, nay, probable scenario!
ReplyDeleteI think there is one thing your forgetting, kids ARE the seeds,but, it's what the grown -ups and society do to condition those seeds, that can cause the trouble. A guy who doesn't take care of his garden or value what she's planting, often finds it choked out by weeds.
ReplyDeleteThere's an amazing amount of thingsd kids can grasp easily, the trouble is that good teachers have become few and far between.
ReplyDeleteI have personally witnessed society beating the creativity out of people.
ReplyDeleteKids like old cartoons better than new ones and they love the 3 Stooges, so I'm on the side that kids in general are more creative than when they grow up.
On a related note, why don't you do a post on whether some races are more creative than others?
I say the Swiss are up there because they can yodel and wear funny pants at the same time.
"Kali, I think we are using different senses of "great" here. I was thinking of artistic masterpieces like the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture."
ReplyDeleteI think a song every kid in the country knows and probably around the world too is pretty great!
kids are great and with them coming in such small sizes they are a lot easier to push up chimneys or down coal mines. On my recent travels to the victorian days i saw this first hand and was amazed at the use these otherwise high maintainance tykes were put to. With nothing but an oversized pin to jab them with, the workhouse masters had incredible control over them. Of course one drew the short straw and was forced by his pals to ask for 'more'... everyone started singing and Harry Seacomb (who is dead) sold a blonde one to Leonard Rossiter (also dead) then all hell broke loose........
ReplyDeleteKids are born evil and society makes them good.
ReplyDeleteHmmm.
ReplyDeleteThe only truly creative kids I've observed (as both a kid and an adult) are the ones who grow up to be creative adults. You're born creative. Or you're not. You can't "learn" to be creative. All of us creative types who read and/or contribute to this blog--we all knew we were creative when we were little; we all knew we had something other kids didn't have. We didn't know why, and we didn't question it. We just went with it, if we were lucky enough to be allowed to, and didn't give what we created much more thought beyond "This will look cool."
I'm not sure I took it even that far. It couldn't have been more organic for me, making puppets and toys, drawing comics, writing stories, printing fake newspapers, doing cool things with refrigerator boxes or mud. It didn't hurt that my siblings were mostly into it too and my mother was a creative person in her own twisted, really-ought-to-have-been-institutionalized sort of way. (We were never sure whether she was giving us the artistic freedom we needed or just didn't give a shit.)
So, obviously, the reason--this is my point--I was able to do all of that crap was that I grew up in a freeform, chaotic house (some might say "pigsty") where you were encouraged to do whatever you wanted to, as long as you promised to clean it all up (HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!) when you were done, or at least remove it from the kitchen table so there would be room to eat dinner.
I still don't know where most of the ideas came from, or what they meant, when I think back on the art I made as a tender youth straight on into my first year at art school. Doing homework that first year was like breathing; I could hardly wait to get home from class so I could get started on that week's assignment. I'd usually already figured out the whole thing in my head, almost immediately after the teacher announced it.
And then... I don't know what happened, but suddenly it was gone. It wasn't that I'd been criticized at school: quite the opposite. My grades were excellent, and my teachers made me feel like this was what I was put on Earth to do. Other students' work (the good work, that is) only inspired me more, rather than making me feel like I sucked by comparison or some crap like that. But somehow, in my second year of art school, that effortless creativity I had enjoyed my entire life was abruptly replaced with Punishingly Blank White Rectangle Syndrome.
It hasn't prevented me from forging ahead, but it's a hell of a lot less fun. Maybe I should have just started dropping acid my junior year. Oh, well.
All these years later I still don't understand what happened, but I haven't got a problem with blaming society. Or the Swiss. As for them being more creative, they can shove those stupid grids and that hideous Bauhaus font up their collective boiled wool-clad petard.
I think anyone who is nostalgic about childhood never was a child
ReplyDelete-Calvin & Hobbes
"Kids aren't wired yet. They're the seed not the fruit. Who wants to be a seed?"
Actually, Eddie, I think kids stop being the seeds about, oh, I don't know, nine months before they are born?
"I think a song every kid in the country knows and probably around the world too is pretty great! "
I agree with Kali, if that had been Mozart's only notable accomplishment he still would've been seen as a genius. They'd probably still have made a movie about him, like they did with the guy who wrote "Yankee Doodle Dandy." What WAAAAS the name of that movie with Jimmy Cagney again?
"On a related note, why don't you do a post on whether some races are more creative than others?"
Hey, John, my theory is that the less ethnic or "pure" something gets, the less creative it is. They like to rub sharp corners off everything and therefore everything gets made less specific and more clean into a homogenous unspecific blob so it can be sold at Wal-Mart. That's the theory behind wonderbread, metalcore music, late 50s pop-rock singers like Ricky Nelson, fast food, Disney fairy tales and frankfurters. They are non-ethnic blander versions of, respectively; bread (which is naturally brown and misshapen), Swedish death metal crossed with D.C. hardcore-punk, Black Rhythm & Blues crossed with Country-Western (very ethnic and specific), hamburgers (which had potatoes and stuff in the meat when they were invented), European fairy tales, and bratwurst.
Whites have their own ethnic creativity but it usually comes from their European heritage. It tends to fade away as people get "Americanized" but Americanization is not the adopting of a new culture, it is simply the erasing of your former culture, and it happens all over the world. Kind of like how John says Disney took away graphic symbols depicting emotions from the early 20s cartoons but didn't replace them with anything.
Does that make sense?
John likes my theory on kids... They exhibit the basest aspects of humanity- selfishness, anger, frustration, destuctiveness. Society tempers this rude behavior and channels the energy in better directions. I think we have prisons and schools backwards. We should teach criminals to be productive members of society and we should incarcerate children until they prove they can be a responsible adult.
ReplyDeleteSee ya
Steve
" We should teach criminals to be productive members of society and we should incarcerate children until they prove they can be a responsible adult."
ReplyDeleteWere you the one who who hates babies? I can't rememberif it was you....sounds like it is!
jorge, "Americanization" isn't erasing your former culture, it's adapting to your current situation.
ReplyDeleteYou can be fully aware of your ancestors, learn all the folk songs, stories, etc. they have to offer. You could then throw your own creative songs, stories in with them (influenced by other cultures). That's adding to your former culture, not taking away from it.
Every continent (not just North America) that ever existed had immigrants, invaders, slaves etc. come in and bring their culture with them. They all added to whatever culture existed at that time. It's just assimilation....not erasing your former culture.
A crib is rather like a jail.
ReplyDeleteWe should teach criminals to be productive members of society and we should incarcerate children until they prove they can be a responsible adult.
ReplyDeleteSee ya
Steve
You can't teach some criminals (like pedophiles) to be "productive members of society".
Children, however, have a blank slate. Kids learn by copying. If you surround them with love, you're more likely to get love back....if you surround them with hate, you'll get hate back.
You don't "incarcerate" a child if you want them to be a responsible adult. You incarcerate a child if you want them to grow up socially stunted and backwards.
A crib is rather like a jail.
ReplyDeleteYeah, and it's abusive to keep babies out from under the kitchen sink too. Draino tastes good.
A cartoon is rather like a baby sitter.
ReplyDeleteok, maybe we can't say they're born creative, but one thing can be said: every kid draws! True or not? All children draw, and at some point most stop. Why does that happen? Is it natural or are we doing something wrong? How can someone NOT have the urge to draw? Specially being in school for hours everyday, with only pen and paper as means to escape from boredom. I'll never understand that.
ReplyDeleteWhen would be the age that you could actually determine whether your kid is creative or not? Too bad there is so much structure and rules that kids have to follow. If everyone had a dad like Adam Sandler in Big Daddy (..Yeah, lame reference) Im sure kids might think up some cool stuff.
ReplyDeleteMerv Griffin composed a tune that every child on earth knows ("The Jeopardy Theme"). Merv would also like to meet every child on earth.
ReplyDeleteI'm young enough to have some pretty solid memories of being a kid, and I remember making up lots of wild stories and scenarios to act out with my sister and our collections of toys. We'd have what were essentially serial adventure stories and make them up as we went along. Sometimes we would invent our own characters and sometimes we would use existing characters, but we always made up our own stories. For a while we even had our own "variety show" (which consisted of setting up this huge 1980s camcorder and having our stuffed animals and dolls do different comedy/musical acts for the camera -- and yes my parents actually let us tape this stuff).
ReplyDeleteAs an adult I find it a lot harder to make up stories. I'm not sure if it's an issue of self-consciousness or a lack of practice or what, but I think I am less creative than I was as a kid. Even though what I do produce now is a lot more SKILLED, I think it's a lot more restrained and it's definitely lost something of the power that came with being a kid who didn't really care what others thought.
Spy Magazine once had an article that illustrated that children were stupid. They gave kids of various ages child-proof jars to open and timed them on how long it took them to accomplish that feat. The fact that it took them a long time proved they were dumber than adults. That and the fact that they couldn't hold down a job.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't find that article online but I did find one that I thought you might be interested in, Eddie. It's about one of your favorite comedians, Jerry Lewis.
http://www.subcin.com/clownspy.html
Merv would also like to meet every child on earth.
ReplyDeleteTell that to Denny Terrio!
On a related note, why don't you do a post on whether some races are more creative than others?
ReplyDeleteI think that's a non-issue really. All cultures both racial and otherwise have had their share of people with tremendous creativity and those who think creativity is a waste of time. Mainly there are two factors that determine whether someone is creative or not:
1. How they are raised.
2. Their own basic brain structure (not physical shape of course, but moreso how their brain works).
Notice for point #2 I didn't say anything about intelligence. Curly Howard may have been a COMEDIC genius but I wouldn't let him do my taxes.
Really, applying race to anything is silly.
Merv Griffin composed a tune that every child on earth knows ("The Jeopardy Theme").
ReplyDeleteIt's really just a paraphrase of "twinkle twinkle".
really, applying race to anything is silly.
Except basketball, penises and natural rhythm.
Bill: Funny story!
ReplyDeleteHunsecker: Wow! Thanks for the Lewis Link! I'd give a lot to see that film!
Lee: That must be part of it!
John: When they have a choice kids do have pretty good taste in cartoons, at least most of the time.
Spizz, Chris: It is puzzling why creativity can just dry up like that. I wish I knew the reason.
Children are easily more creative than adults.
ReplyDeleteFirst, children believe anything is possible...therefore they have a limitless source of inspiration material.
Second, children do not develop a social consciousness and awareness until they are much older (pre-teens). Therefore, they are not as embarassed with developing a new, revolutionary idea.
Third, children do not know social rules until much older. Therefore, they are not as constrained in their thinking because they do not know the rules.
Fourth, children are not encumbered with other responsibilities. When you are a child you don't need to worry about bills, money, investments, spousal responsiblities, parental responsibilities. If a child develops a revolutionary, contrary idea that no one accepts, he doesn't need to worry about social or financial repurcusions. Why do you think the tenure system was invented.
And different cultures definitely have extreme differences in nurturing creativity. I can elaborate on this later.
Eric: An excellent argument! I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about the other cultures!
ReplyDeleteFrom where I sit, the worst unwarranted government intrusion into the marketplace was Child Labor Laws. Imagine vast armies of tiny chimneysweeps, miners & oyster-shuckers who could vote with their pocketbooks.
ReplyDeleteGoing off a a bit of a tangent here, but Will Ferrel produced a short film called "The Landlord" that I think you might find amusing :) check it out on his site http://www.funnyordie.com
ReplyDeleteThank goodness you are the kind of person willing to take a photograph of the kid in white paint disaster zone instead of having a heart attack on the spot!!
Kelly: Ha! That video was hilarious! Thanks for linking to it!
ReplyDeleteThe kids in the pictures aren't mine, I got the photos off the internet. I didn't think of it til you mentioned it but the father of the living room painter must have been a nice guy if he had the cool to take a picture rather than blow his top.
Children are more creative naturally, because they see the world and everything in it for the first time. Fantasy and reality are intertwined for them in a way most adults(or teenagers for that matter)lose as a matter of course, in having to deal with the real world and all its harshness.
ReplyDeleteKids can be cruel, but not nearly as cruel as adults. They hurt and are hurt--but mostly for a very brief moment, and barring any serious abuse easily forgive and even forget. Adults hold lifelong grudges. Kids are naturally loving and enthusiastic, adults are generally not(again, assuming no brain damage or emotional damage).
Kids are swell until they reach adolescence. Sexuality brings some fun stuff, but the loss of real innocence is a bummer. Kids up until the age of 12 or so are truly amazing.
So sayeth me. ; )
I like to think that we can stimulate both children and grown-ups in their creativity by also making sure we do an effort for proper attribution and recognition of ones work.
ReplyDeleteKids are said to follow good examples so in reusing the picture from our daughter it would have been nice to show some effort to contact us about the reuse, or at least mention where you got it from.
It is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/78392448@N00/54641857/ by the way.