Boosting imagination in children can help develop their mental abilities, creativity and problem-solving skills, says Gihan Shahine When she was still just three years old, Sarah used to say that she would like to be a cleaning lady when she grew up whenever she was asked about a future career. Surprising as this answer may be, it could still be significant. Sarah answered in the way she did as a result of her imagination: having watched her mother doing the daily household chores, she was determined to mimic her. It was no wonder, then, that she imagined herself as a cleaning lady when she grew up. Today, Sarah, now in her teens, has set her sights higher and wants to be a vet. Child psychologists say that simple questions directed at children like what would you like to be when you grow up can tremendously help them develop their imaginative powers. However, few parents realise the importance of boosting the power of imagination in their kids. "Most parents in our culture tend to focus on their children's academic achievements. They don't care much if their children draw nice pictures or play good music," deplores Heba El-Shahawi, a professor of child psychiatry at Ain Shams University in Cairo. "Many parents may even tend to unconsciously kill their children's power of imagination by being too strict and rule-oriented, forcing their children to obey orders without listening to their opinions or correcting them," she adds. Psychologists agree that imagination can be a powerful tool to promote children's cognitive skills, creativity, problem-solving abilities and the way they think, achieve goals and choose their future careers. After all, writes Andrew Loh on the website brainychild.com, "the greatest of all discoveries and inventions of the past have been the direct result of curiosity, imagination and creativity." "Imagination allows children an unlimited freedom to work on their ideas and interests," Loh explains. "It helps them to probe and explore the world around them and create an orderly idea or meaning for their future life." Many child development experts insist that the power of imagination helps develop creativity, focus, attention and visualisation skills, as well as the ability to ponder the future, such as what they want to be when they grow up. "Imagination makes people dream and gives them the motivation to realise their dreams," El-Shahawi agrees. And if parents spot this and help develop their children's skills early in life, they will also be helping their children realise their dreams in the future and so have a happy and fulfilled adulthood. Pretend play can help children imagine themselves in different situations, and this in turn can help them be more creative and better thinkers, as well as budding inventors and efficient solvers of problems. A study conducted at Case Western Reserve University in the US and published on the website babycentre.com found that "children who are imaginative when they're young tend to keep this quality as they get older and become better problem-solvers." "Tested later in life, early 'imaginators' had more resources to draw on when it came to coping with challenges and difficult situations, such as what to do if they forgot a book they needed for school that day," according to the study. The research also found that imagination empowers children with a sense of control over their lives, and pretend play allows them to explore and express both negative and positive emotions, practice new things and try to manage situations the way they want. Even mimicking their mother's household chores can give children the sense that they can be helpful and useful, thus building their confidence and self-esteem. "Stories in which the three little pigs thwart the big bad wolf, or imaginary games in which his teddy bear submits to a bath, give a child the sense that he can be powerful and in control even in unfamiliar or scary situations," according to babycentre.com. In her book Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon Marjorie Taylor points out that preschoolers who have imaginary friends are often found to be "more creative, have greater social understanding and are better at taking on the perspective of others." Childhood imaginary friends can also be instrumental in helping children cope with stress. Whereas children can be born with the gift of imagination, the good news is that parents can also help boost this power in the first years of children's life. According to babycentre.com, newborns are born with about 100 billion brain cells. Each brain cell sends and receives electrical signals and creates connections among cells that through repetition turn into networks. "These networks (often called wiring or circuitry) allow a child to think and learn. By the third birthday, your toddler's brain will have formed about 1,000 trillion connections," write experts at babycentre.com. The worrying point is that these connections can either become permanent if used repeatedly or disappear if they are neglected, which explains why so many experts in child development give a lot of attention to the first three years of a child's life since this is the period when a child's brain forges the pathways that will be used for the rest of his life. "Everything you do with your toddler, from playing to eating, walking, reading, and singing helps jump-start his brain," advise experts at babycentre.com. "As you expose your toddler to new sights, sounds, and sensations, you open his mind to a bigger, more exciting world. And when you use your imagination with him -- 'look, I'm a tiger in the jungle!' 'Let's pretend we're going to grandma's house' -- you spur his brain to forge imagination pathways of its own." Mothers can spot early signs of imagination in their toddlers when they mimic their acts at home. Al-Shahawi insists that mothers should start helping their children to do so from early infanthood on. "A mother should let her baby touch and feel things by himself and try new things and explore as much as he can when he starts to walk, so long as he does not harm himself or damage things of course," she advises. "Mothers should also allow a certain amount of time for free play when kids should not worry much about messing up themselves or their surroundings. Older children should be given enough opportunity to practise hobbies like painting and music and they should be allowed to engage in problem-solving." Parents do not have to buy expensive toys or do extraordinary things to boost their children's imaginative power and creativity. In his book It's just my Imagination, American psychologist Rich Keeling encourages children to avoid video games, television and modern technology, which have largely "substituted natural imaginative thought". Instead, he advises that children should rather depend on the "simple props" that can be found in their homes to entertain themselves and use their minds to create and imagine what is possible. For Keeling, imagination can turn the simplest objects and props in the house into "a gateway into magical worlds, an exploration of future careers, when mud can be turned into dough to make pizza, a cardboard box can be fancied as a spaceship and a broom can be imagined as a guitar." "The child uses these props to dream about his future," Keeling writes. "Perhaps he will grow up to be an author holding a book signing, an astronaut, or a famous musician. The endless possibilities are both more practical and expansive than limited video game scenarios." One of the main benefits Keeling envisions in using the imagination is to be "able to think in an abstract sense. A sort of 'outside the box' manner of thinking promotes rising above simply mediocrity... this type of thinking will promote a boost to the healthy psychological development of the child," Keeling argues. Noha El-Sahrawi, the mother of three young children aged six, five and three, is also an ardent believer in the power of imagination, which she says is an integral part of the brain development techniques she uses with her children at home. El-Sahrawi's eldest daughter was born with Down's Syndrome, and this special need on the part of her daughter soon turned El-Sahrawi herself into a special mother. She went to the US to study brain development at the Glenn Doman Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential, and she has since been applying what she learned there to her three children. Her Down's Syndrome daughter is now six, and, thanks to such techniques, she is integrated into a mainstream school. "People are born with eight sorts of intelligence, and each has special techniques that a mother can use to boost it in the first years of a child's life," El-Sahrawi explained to Al-Ahram Weekly. "Imagination is an important tool used in all brain development techniques, but it is crucial that a mother learns how to develop it in the right way, in order that a child can differentiate between fact and fiction." Story-telling, according to El-Sahrawi, can be a great booster to children's imagination, especially if a mother stimulates her children's critical thinking by using a "what if" technique when narrating a story. El-Sahrawi used to let her children contemplate different paintings and identify the differences in what they could see, or sleep in the open air and contemplate the sky, or make a plan of their bedrooms, or sometimes even engage in painting a wall. They would try to match shapes of different colours found in the reception area of the flat with others placed in their bedrooms, all techniques aiming to help boost their spatial and visual intelligence. "They may end up as artists, designers, or engineers, who knows," El-Sahrawi says. For now, El-Sahrawi can enjoy one important and simple technique, which is listening to classical music and the Quran. "It has been found that listening to Mozart can help develop the mathematical intelligence of children, but listening to music and the Quran in general also boosts musical intelligence and helps develop the auditory pathways in the brain," El-Sahrawi maintains. She adds that her five-year-old son has already memorised a whole chapter of the Quran in three months without a mentor. "All I did was make him listen to the tape every night during the first hour of his sleep when the brain is said to be still functioning," she said. "Now he knows it by heart." IN ORDER to help develop your children's imaginative intelligence, try the following: - Read lots of stories and books with big, colourful pictures as early as possible. - Fill your toddlers' lives with music and singing and/or the Quran if you are Muslim. - Free pretend play is the key to a child's imaginative development. - Use simple props for play activities that can be found at home. - Hand-puppets, dolls houses and mechanical and engineering play sets can also help. - Make sure your child learns to tell fact from fiction. - And limit TV time.
