Play is the birthplace of creativity

play, time, space, stuff and permission

In 2014 I wrote for the first time about how I did not feel that it was boredom that was the birthplace of creativity - instead I argued it was time… I now change that and say it is play - but that unfilled time is the temporal space that allows autonomous play to occur.

Children are often micromanaged in a bid to ensure they develop on target, are safe, are learning the right things to get into the right school and to attain the right grades, and even their free time from school is managed with sport and other extracurricular activities. There is little time to just be, to be comfortable with own thoughts, and for those thoughts to bubble into creative ideas.

I also wonder if it is that we as adults are afraid of children using the phrase

"I'm bored" ?

Because, when I have given myself the time to think, and rethink... really they are two very different things... Being bored is not the most creative state to be in - but having unscheduled time and space to allow children (people in general really) to get creative is different - and maybe we should start thinking more about the word "BORED" and what does it mean. If I am a child at school and I am bored and I have to sit through boring lessons, and I am expected to listen and pay attention... I hardly think that it is going to increase my creativity or ability to learn... in fact there is the HUGE risk that it is going to have the opposite effect... it will demotivate. Of course if you are arguing that, as some articles over the last decade do that you have to suck it up because school is boring and life is boring then what we are doing is saying it is OK for schools to continue as they are... I find that children who are curious about their learning, who find the learning meaningful, etc are seldom bored by school... so if a child is bored by school maybe the school has failed to motivate why their teaching is meaningful or to establish a sense of curiosity... this does not mean teachers need to or should edutain... it means teachers should be aware of how their students learn. And the problem is that the education system leans into edutainment rather than curiosity because it is more controllable. And children who have let go of their powers of curiosity, wonder and play to be edutained then become dependent on adults filling the time for them, because they have seldom been given the chance to do that for themselves.

AND - if we are forcing academic learning on ever younger children, especially the kind of teaching which is not age appropriate, then of course it is going to be harder for children and teachers to find the meaningfulness in the learning when play should still be the main medium of learning.

Summer "boredom" might be a different phenomena - by emptying the days of activities, decided and lead by adults, it gives the time to the children to GET CREATIVE - to start thinking about what THEY can do... the potential of the things around them... and in the beginning when children are not used to thinking for themselves, when they are used to having their time filled by others (school, afterschool activities, clubs etc etc) then at first there is the risk of the children saying "I'm bored". And that parents might feel guilty.

I don't think they are really bored... they just don't know what to do, or how to get started... and maybe what we as adults need to do is not interpret the children as actually bored, like the children express in words, but that these children need more space (physical, cognitive, emotional, social and temporal) to practice filling their own time.

I like rest time for children... not only does it allow children the time to sleep if their body and minds need it.. but it gives children (all people) the time to feel comfortable with their own thoughts... to explore their own thoughts - to develop their creativity... I do not think you should force a child to sleep that does not need sleep, but to encourage young children to relax for 30 minutes and to get comfortable with their inner voice is a great first step in allowing children control over how to fill their time. And my observations of rest/nap time is that many children use the word boring when they have not been given adequate strategies as to how to fill this down time. Instead of rest time being a negative must, I think it is important to create a calm time that is filled with joy. This is what I have always done, and it takes time, but those children who called rest time boring, began to long for rest time and to dream and hatch plans for the afternoon, and another big part of rest time being boring was actually fear of falling asleep and missing out on fun - so promises of waking children up if they happened to fall asleep removed so much anxiety and rest time became a space for children to fill themselves - with dreams, listening to stories and small quiet play movements that did not disturb others.

The film shows a rest time where the book that had been read before lying down became at a sensory object the movement (feel, sound, look) the reflections of light on the partially shiny pages, the creation of tunnels and looking through them, and sometimes absolutely absent minded movements. I would argue that this is not being bored - this is filling empty time with quiet activities and an internal dialogue - some children had not fully learned how to internalise their inner dialogue, so you can hear the quiet play of a child who had brought her socks to life and was engaged in play with them.

When I was in Canada I got talking with Diane Kashin and some others about "Provocations" - are they really provoking thought in the children - or are they filling time? Are they an opportunity for creativity or are they the product of teacher creativity on the children's behalf?

I have no answers, I am just thinking and rethinking... have some provocations become a glorified template where the activity is pre-selected by the teacher (the colours, the resources, the material, the topic etc etc) and all the children need to do is sit down and do it as they would have if colouring in a pre-made picture, or filling in a worksheet? How is the balance of thinking... are the children doing enough? Enough what? Enough of the right thing to prove to parents and authorities that the school is doing a good job? What about enough autonomy? What about contributing to the community of learner enough? How much is enough?

Is there scope for the children to develop the provocation - to be creative - and is there documentation as to why that provocation has been put out... what is it that is being provoked - and afterwards was it successful as that kind of provocation... or did it provoke something else? Instead of provocations on the table etc... could children be provoked by emptying their schedule...?

I did that with a group of 24 seven to eight year olds once... we sat together at the start of the session and I let them know that for the whole afternoon no toys or equipment was to be used in their play. That was all that I said. They sat there "bored" not moving for ten minutes, at least, just complaining... then one got up and asked if some others wanted to play - and they started role-play games, chase games in the outdoor area (as they could freely move in and outside) and the following 3-4 hours were filled with amazing collaborative play - and the children went home happy - some even saying it was the best day ever... I had to be prepared that the children would just sit there in silence and whine for the whole afternoon... and some sat there longer than others until the laughter and play drew them off the sofas and into the creative play. I was not afraid of the children having nothing to do, I was not afraid of them going home and saying they had been bored - because in the end I knew - I knew, I believed in their competence - that they would be able to fill time with their imaginations... either sitting or playing together. I handed over TIME to the children, something I think children seldom get to have power over, for one reason or another... So no, I don't think boredom is essential but I do think TIME - unfilled time for the children to fill themselves is. I also believe that when children exclaim "I'm bored" it often means that they have not been given enough time to think through the possibilities... or enough practice at filling their own time. I also think it is really hard for adults to see children struggling to think of something to do. Over the years I have done this with various aged children… and basically it has never gone beyond ten minutes for play or dialogue to get going, but interestingly the older the children the longer the time it takes for them to start playing. It’s almost as if they have been trained out of their creativity - which is what reports in creativity also suggest - Nasa’s creativity test led by George Land showed that preschoolers were more creative than their older counterparts… 98% of 3-5 year olds displayed genius-level creativity: 30% at 10 years, 12% at 15 years, and a paltry 2% in adults. Society’s constraints, it seemed, were snuffing out the inherent creative genius within (Land & Jarman, 1992).

Could this be that the older humans get the less time they are allowed to play?

As parents we emptied my children’s childhood of many of the must-do's, we did not do lots of extra-curricular activities as I felt a 6 hours day at preschool ( I worked part time to keep their days short) and then school was busy enough... they needed time to be themselves. They did not watch TV, except for a film or documentary on Fridays (mostly David Attenborough nature programmes, to the extent that I think at one stage they thought he was part of the family) until they were almost 7 when they struggled with conversations in school which was heavily focussed on TV amongst friends. No smart phones until they were 13, despite almost all their friends having them.

My aim was to give them space. Smart phones are world in the pocket time fillers - they are amazing tools to use, but they steal children’s time. My children had old fashioned phones so we could contact each other when needed. These days I think I might extend it to 16 if I was to do it again… at least for my youngest child.

Sometimes I felt pangs of guilt, sometimes I looked at other families and the amazing things their children were doing and wondered if I was putting my three children at a disadvantage... but I see my daughters now, and all their achievements and adventures with studies, work, activism, sport etc Both of them have found their OWN voice and their own paths. Of course we have supported them the whole way... but we have tried to give them the space and time they need to work this out for themselves. They are successful not because I filled their time with a whole load of extra activities, but because they had the imagination and power to dare to dream of their own path to take.

My son on the other hand had struggled with school - it was just so incredibly boring for him, he couldn’t find the purpose of most things he had to learn - which meant he was constantly being disliked by teachers because he lacked the ability to self regulate his disgust at being forced to learn things that seemed utterly meaningless. Being bored has not been a positive experience.

Boredom is a complex social phenomenon that can impact mental health, cognition and behaviour - and it is scientifically linked to depression, anxiety, substance use, impulsivity and increased risk-taking behaviours (like shop lifting, speeding etc). Sandseters early studies show that a lack of risky PLAY in childhood can manifest in these kind of risky behaviours instead. (Webmd.com describes the warning signs for boredom here and in 2019 Columbia University shared why boredom is bad for your health - here )

I put forward today that instead or boredom it is PLAY that gives birth to creativity. Children need time, space, stuff and permission to play. To come up with ideas and put them into action, to fail, to try again, to laugh at mistakes, feel frustrated and get over it. To be quiet, to be loud, to be still and to run around...
The problem is PLAY has become an endangered species - and in some areas virtually extinct. The emptiness of a world devoid of PLAY is daunting indeed.
It is empty time that the children do not know how to fill themselves because they have not had the chance to do that - well-meaning adults have filled their time for them.
To avoid boredom children need a thriving PLAY ecosystem. Being bored is not what makes us creative.

Instead creativity needs

• Unfilled time.

• Curiosity and wonder

• Imagination - and freedom to put it into action

• Experiences and knowledge and skills to use and to refine

• Permission and possibility to interact with others and stuff

(half of the essential thread of Original Learning)

Children use the word bored when they don't know what to do - because it's an unpleasant feeling to not know. But bored means disinterested, no feeling of excitement, difficulty to be motivated, unable to relax.
These are also uncomfortable feelings. But being disinterested is not the same as not knowing what to do.

I am also concerned about how some schools and preschools talk about summer and not wanting summer activities to be too much fun because then all the parents will want to send their children there. Imagine deliberately choosing to make days boring for children who need to attend preschool/fritids to ensure only a few children attend. I think freeing up time for children to invent their own play is a very different attitude towards children and their play than seeking to ensure the summer is boring to avoid more/envious children.

It’s quite the contrast to other countries where summer camps are not included in ordinary term time fees, and there is a deliberate intention to make each week long session filled with meaning, fun and opportunities to discover.

Allowing children the discomfort of not knowing what to do is necessary for those children who have forgotten how to PLAY- because they WILL remember.
What we can do is position things that can inspire without telling them what to do. A choice of stuff (a stuffet - like buffet for food but instead a smörgåsbord of possibilities). Or connect with other families to arrange places where children can meet.
Because Covid lockdowns taught us -

• boredom is devastating,

• children need children.

• PLAY needs freedom/permission

• creativity is ideas in action

Alison Gopnik wrote that play is the mother of invention, and when we were discussing creativity as a phenomena in Bali invention and innovation were words that were intertwined with creativity. Brené Brown in her book “The Power of Vulnerablity” writes about the importance of the interweaving of play, rest and creativity.

Rest is right there with play in article 31 of UN Rights of Children.

and when I was listening to Nobel prize winners talk about their research, creativity and innovation rest, empty time is one of the things that they mention - not just work work work - but unfilled time where the brain can wander. Not being bored… but having time not filled with a mass of musts. (I am lucky that I have had the chance to listen to a number of Nobel prize winners talk as I chose to pay for membership at the Nobel Prize Museum here in Stockholm that allows me to attend so many interesting talks.)

Back in 2015 I made the conscious decision to have a minimum of 30 minutes dedicated daydream time every day. It has made a big positive impact on my mental health - my time not being constantly filled with “musts”. I also feel so much more creative because I feel less weighed down, and more open to possibilities.

I have also been walking the land as a conscious attempt to decolonise the way I think and respond to the world - to be able to slow down, look closely and listen deeply. Peeling off the musts and allowing myself to connect. This too, has been a creative process. (This is a part of Arboreal Methodologies that I did with Professor Jayne Osgood, and continues as Arboreal Dialogues as I continue to walk the land). My husband struggles with my slow walks, they are too boring for him apparently - while for me they are filled with wonder and tiny everyday joys that go missed - he does though appreciate the photos afterwards.

Time to just sit and look up and think, daydream, to be. Not bored, but to thoroughly enjoy time not being filled by others, by musts, and by expectations.

Time to watch the water drip

Play is the birthplace of creativity by AI (boy did AI struggle to find something vaguely playful)