Stop Trying to Make Your Kids Creative
6/16/202634 min
Parents are being sold creativity like it's a subscription box. Workshops, kits, frameworks, scripts: the message being that your kid needs more imagination and it's your job to install it. Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist and Don't Call It Art, has a different take: your kid already has it. The imagination, the playfulness, the willingness to not-know — it's all there. The question isn't how to give it to them. It's how to stop blocking it. And maybe, while we're here, how to get a little of it back ourselves.
Dr. Becky and Austin talk about what creativity actually needs to thrive (not a workshop), what so-called "problem kids" and great artists have in common, why your kid's obsession with garage doors is not a problem, the link between play and depression, the game that got Austin through the pandemic, and the teeth-brushing song Becky invented entirely by accident.
Read Dr. Becky’s ideas for how to be a playful parent when you don’t feel like playing.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAustin Kleon· Guest0:00
I can't get this out of my head, so I'm just gonna tell you. You know the game I played when I was bottomed out the most, I read about during the pandemic: what's on my butt? Do you know what's on my butt?
Dr. Becky Kennedy· Host0:10
[laughs] What is it?
Austin Kleon· Guest0:11
[laughs] Do you wanna hear about the game?
Dr. Becky Kennedy· Host0:13
I do.
Austin Kleon· Guest0:14
Um, you lay down f- flat- flat- flat on the couch or on the bed. Yeah, yeah. [laughs] You lay down, you close your eyes, and the kids put- [gasps] ... something on your butt, [laughs] and you get to guess- What's on my butt ... what [laughs] it is.
Dr. Becky Kennedy· Host0:33
Raise a creative kid. Every parent I talk to is being told that right now. Raise a creative kid. Protect their imagination. Nothing's gonna matter in the world going forward except for originality. It's on every podcast, every parenting account, every school newsletter. And then I read Austin Kleon's new book, and it felt initially counterintuitive and then retrospectively obvious. Because Austin's whole argument is your kid already has it, the imagination, the originality, the creativity. It's not something we have to install in them. We don't have to give it to them. It's something they came with. And so the question isn't how to put it in there or build it. The question, what we're really gonna be talking about today, and it's mind-blowing stuff, but also remarkably simple, is how do we kind of just create the conditions to preserve it and for our kid to access it? And then there's also a little bit of a deeper question, which I think you're gonna appreciate. Do we have access to ours? And guess