Hooray! My Daughter Has the Creative Bug: Raising Creative Kids
My five-year-old is constantly creating. Painting, drawing, crafting, making. Anything she can get her hands on (toilet rolls, scraps of paper, delivery boxes). And the funny thing is, I've never pushed my career onto either of my kids. I work downstairs, so they don't ever see me paint, and I don’t run "Introduction to Watercolour with Mum" classes at home. But OF COURSE it makes me happy!!
I wasn't personally encouraged to take art seriously as a kid. My parents came to Australia with $500 and a suitcase. When you've built everything from nothing, you steer your kids toward stability: Doctors, lawyers, financially reliable careers that are reassuring and stable. Art wasn't on the shortlist (again, understandable).
So I found my way to having a creative career path on my own.
So for my daughter, I’m not pushing her to take over the studio one day or anything (though, honestly… cute). But because creativity for its own sake is worth something. The joy of making, just because you wanted to make it, is a feeling I want her to grow up knowing.
Not everything needs to lead somewhere. Some things just need to feel good.
Something we've been doing lately: Sketchbook walks. It’s wildly simple.
Grab a sketchbook and a pen (or more supplies if you’re taking a bag) and walk toward colour. Flowers. A building with interesting shapes. Pretty colours in an evening sky - whatever catches your eye. Capture it in the sketchbook. Date it. Walk home.
That's it!
Don’t feel like you need to make it good. No comparing it to anything. Just the practice of looking at the world and drawing it down.
It works for kids and, honestly, just as well for adults who've been telling themselves they're not creative.
The sketchbook becomes a record of what you noticed, what you were drawn to, what the world looked like on that particular Tuesday. Isn’t that lovely??
We're only just getting started with this at home, but I'm enjoying it more than I expected. Watching a five-year-old decide a flower is worth drawing (“Look at the petals!”) is a surprisingly good reminder of why any of us pick up a brush in the first place.
If you want to follow along with more of this, the best place is over on Instagram.