Creativity is diminishing from childhood
Legos are partly to blame
Lego sets are all the rage. I suspect that I could walk into most homes in America and find at least one erected set sitting on a shelf, whether it be in a child’s bedroom or in an adult’s living room. The sets span a wide range of interests, from your favorite licensed characters to floral bouquets to famous castles, ensuring there is something for everyone. Lego sets are the starkest symbol of declining creativity, despite the company’s claim that they still have an interest in their customer’s desire to build and rebuild using their bricks.
In all honesty, if you walk into my living room, you’ll see a bouquet of Lego flowers and a Lego robin and hummingbird proudly displayed. I like the way they look mixed in with my real-life plants, but the funny thing is, when assembling those sets, I felt like I was doing a chore to get to an end, not embarking on a creative endeavor. Isn’t that the opposite feeling one should have when playing with Legos?
The instructions for Lego sets are detailed, ensuring that you erect them properly, according to Lego’s vision. Even if I wanted to get creative, many of the sets are designed in such a way that they limit creativity. Flower petals, for example, are flower petals. You don’t build them, and the pieces can’t be used for any other purpose. The sets don’t come with enough pieces to create your own flower petals, or even contain pieces that could make up a petal.
I asked my daughter if she wanted to help me build some daffodils using Legos, and she was ecstatic to do so. However, she lost interest fairly quickly because “helping” meant following these instructions: put this piece here, that piece goes there, the petal goes here, the leaf goes there, and blah, blah, blah.
My daughter loves Legos. She will happily pull out her Duplo Legos at any time of day, on any day of the week. When you sit down to play with her and you ask her what she wants to play, more often than not—much more often than not—she will say “Legos”. She likes to build houses and pools and stairs and hiding places for her people (a random assortment of figurines that fill an Easter bucket). She has one Duplo set, the train set, otherwise she plays with Lego bricks. If she wants the bricks to function as a house, she uses them to build a house, or asks her dada or me, or guests who are visiting for dinner, to help her make the house. Earlier this week, she told her dada that she wanted her people to swing, which is her all-time favorite outdoor activity. What her dada or I could have done was get on Amazon or Lego’s website and order her the Duplo outdoor playset, which does exist. But instead, her dada got some twine out of our junk drawer and helped her make a swing.
I’m not going to lie, I’ve been tempted to purchase some of the Duplo sets because they look fun. But that’s the thing: I, the adult with a sad excuse for an imagination compared to that of a toddler, think they look fun. And maybe they are fun for kids, but kids don’t need them to have fun. Ready-made fun—i.e., “look, all the things you need to create a swingset are in this box”—grabs the attention of adults because the adult-self thinks their child-self would have had more fun if they had the set, or the kit, or what have you. But when these adults were children, they weren’t sitting around unable to have their figurines play on a swingset because a pre-fab swingset for their figurines didn’t exist. They made one up, they used their imagination, they created what they wanted to play with. My two-year-old daughter doesn’t need a Lego swingset, she doesn’t care how the swing set comes into being. She loves the one her and her dada made.
My husband and I would be doing our daughter a disservice by purchasing what she can use her imagination to create. She wouldn’t be developing her problem solving skills, for one, nor her fine motor skills. And who will be our inventors if creativity is stripped from childhood?
There are so many other examples like this in the modern world. I came across an elaborate domino run that I thought would be exciting to build, but stopped myself from purchasing it. I said to myself: you created your own domino runs in childhood, let your daughter do the same. DON’T FALL FOR THE TRAP. I will purchase the dominos and the marbles, but the rest can be up to her.
Mud kitchens, which I recently learned about, are another example. Parents can now purchase play kitchens to put outdoors so that their children can make stuff with mud. If my daughter wants to play in the dirt, first of all, I’m not going to encourage it for the obvious reason of the mess. Second of all, she has no problem getting out her buckets and shovels and digging in the dirt. Encouragement by me is not needed. The only guidance I provide, once I pick up on her intentions, is to direct her to which piles of dirt she is allowed to dig in — not the garden, is what I say.
Any time I am tempted to purchase a set or kit, especially with detailed instructions, of something that my daughter can use her imagination and items found around the house to create, I think about a specific memory from my childhood: My grammie’s backyard seemed huge to me as a child, but it was actually quite small. There was a tree that I loved to climb, but otherwise, there wasn’t much in the yard except unused bricks and large rocks—I’m guessing for her flowers or plants she had growing back there. I would use these rocks and bricks to create the rooms of my imaginary house, where imaginary people lived, doing imaginary things. I don’t recall anything concrete about that house other than the bricks and rocks. Everything but those two items was completely made up, but I would play in that house with those imaginary people and imaginary objects day after day. I, of course, also spent my days at her house doing other things like making playdough birthday cakes, riding my bike up and down the street, and playing with my friends, but my backyard house stands out to me as a quintessential childhood activity that seems to be lost.
The kids are not at fault for this loss. They will go on generation after generation using their imagination to create things as simple as swingsets for figurines to things as complex as houses as big as a backyard, so long as adults don’t intervene and give them a tangible item that abates their imagination. Childhood creativity needs to make a comeback, and it starts with adults deciding not to purchase prefab experiences for the children in their lives. Let children solve problems and create what had previously only been imagined. They will be more capable, and interesting, adults as a result.