When you think back to your childhood, what is your earliest memory of your creative activities? Was it stacking up blocks? Perhaps you can remember finger painting with those mushy cold goopy colors you so loved to put everywhere but on the paper? That was fun! Eventually we all get to have a crayon or two in our hands and are allowed the freedom to scribble at will. If we had really radical parents, we even got to express ourselves by expanding our drawings to the bedroom wall. We were truly artists then. Of course as our dexterity increased we graduated to the coloring book. We learned how to select appropriate colors and how to stay in the lines and before you knew it, for some of us, our creativity became narrowly defined by subjective evaluation.

Our coloring book beginnings sometimes direct us to the type of artist we’re going to be. Radical scribblers that refuse to color inside the lines and select the “right” color for the red apple just may grow up to live outside of the box. Just as the “color inside the lines” and “select the perfect color” types may live inside the box. Perhaps even the “inline” coloring child grows up to rebel and scream out of their pre-defined style. Who knows, they could end up a scribbler after all.

An artist is an artist no matter how you look at the picture. Both types grow up to be the artist all the same. There has been plenty of room in this world for the Rembrandt versus the Dali or the Renoir versus the Warhol. It is our job to encourage creativity in our current and future artists no matter what their style of expression. The key to encouragement is to remember that all art is “good” art and we must be careful with our words so that we don’t crush the desire for a young person to create. If little Marie wants to color the elephant half green and half purple with polka dot ears, she’s a future Picasso in the making. If she is asked to color the elephant pink, her imagination just may be stifled. Equally so, children develop at different speeds and not everyone can or wants to color inside the lines. Telling a child they can do a better job when they cannot is a sure fire way to bruise a developing ego and give that child a performance complex. The creative arts are a rare area to which our children will find the choice to express themselves freely. If they can feel free to express themselves without criticism coming out of the starting blocks in the arts, their self-esteem can be built up for other subjects in school.

You don’t have to wait until your child starts kindergarten to get them involved in creative activities. There are lots of ways to get young people involved in art projects once they have their full range of dexterity (around the age of three). Cool products are out there in learning toy stores that can make creating fun. There is moldable foam for sculpturing any kind of object or animal your child can think of. Of course there is always the traditional tried and true clay. You can never go wrong with clay. There is a coloring book designed just for 3-year-olds that uses giant sponge bottle tip applicators to color with. Your child simply dots with the sponge bottles and fills in the holes on the pages in order to make beautiful pictures. Super giant crayons are available for little fingers to grab onto to both color in large-pictured coloring books or to draw on blank sheets of paper (my preference). There are also new giant creamy crayons on the market. They look really fun. Best of all, there are easels made just for 3-year-olds and up. Every child should own his or her own easel!

You don’t need a fat pocketbook to encourage creativity. The best kind of creative expression we can teach our children can be found using the simplest and most inexpensive means possible, by using one’s own imagination in nature. Building sandcastles or collecting nature’s gifts like feathers, stones, shells and even fuzzy little caterpillars are just as essential to the creative expression of a developing child as the crayon and paper.

Imagine the future filled with art of all sorts produced by today’s children. In order to preserve the arts, we must first encourage and help develop our little people, as they are the future.