The risk of an impoverished imagination.

I’ve got some good kids. They’re smart, pretty well-behaved, and fun. I wouldn’t call them particularly imaginative, though. They don’t much seem to engage in the kind of pretend play I remember absorbing myself in as a kid. In fact, they often seem weirdly literal for a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old.

Maybe it’s a result of the “screen time” they’ve gotten (guilty), and the fact that as mentioned in a previous installment, we’ve been so hands-on and omnipresent in their lives; they haven’t had as much of a chance to break off from the world of adults and enter in the fantastical world of children. Perhaps it’s another unintended consequence of the lack of free time just mentioned — structured activities come with predetermined parts, guidelines, ends; they require only a fraction of the creativity called upon by more open-ended play.

It’s not just that the activities of modern children are more structured either, but that their toys are too. Left to their own devices, children must make use of “loose parts” in the environment, seeing in them numerous possibilities, and making up their own rules for how the world works — a stick becomes a sword; dirt clods become grenades; the driveway becomes lava.

In contrast, the toys given children these days have a preset and very explicit built-in function. It seems that for toymakers (and their parental customers) “fun” is not a sufficient purpose for a toy; instead they consistently tout their playthings’ educational qualities. Yet by designing toys to be “brain boosters,” their use becomes fixed — a wagon can be played with in an infinite number of ways; a gadget where you press a button to learn numbers can be “played” with by pressing buttons to learn numbers. Such structured toys may enhance one aspect of children’s cognitive abilities, but it leaves fallow their capacity for imagination.

The result of this emphasis on structured, educationally-focused play is a generation of young people who are like my kids: capable of smart thinking, but only along narrow lines. In a study titled “The Creativity Crisis” Kyung Hee Kim notes that while intelligence and SAT scores have been rising in the last couple decades, scores on tests of creativity have declined, so that:

The most significant decline has been seen in “Elaboration” scores, which test people’s ability to take existing ideas, reflect on them, and then build on them in new ways.

It’s the kind of ability that grows not from looking at a screen where X=X, but navigating an open environment where X might equal Y or Z or D. Where a pinecone becomes a telephone; a rock, a fossil; a hollow tree, a hideout.

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