Raising Imagination Is a Lost Parenting Art

When I was a little girl, I dressed up as Queen Esther each year for the Jewish holiday of Purim. In my mother’s sparkly silver dress, borrowed from a bygone era, I layered chunky costume jewelry and perched a tiara on my head. I felt…like her in my costume, all the more so when side by side with friends dressed up just the same. Research in early childhood¹ has always emphasized pretend play as a critical part of learning and development, a way that children can directly touch ideas and understand them. Becoming Queen Esther gave me a way to remember her story and to begin to understand what it could feel like to be a courageous leader.

Imagination fuels more than pretend play

Parents and researchers alike, however, are quick to relegate the importance of the imagination to a single period of life, raising children to eventually put away their tiaras and other childish things in favor of realistic pursuits. As the children’s mental health crisis grows, though, therapists and academics like me are taking a new look at the ways we help parents raise healthy kids who will create a better world.

The prevailing conversation on mental wellness focuses heavily on a single function of the human brain: The mind reacts to the world around us, using feelings and thoughts to make sense of things, and then we behaviorally react. From this perspective, mental wellness involves behavioral choices that fit well with the world around us. Becoming mentally well in this view emphasizes the need to pay attention to the body, often reducing how much we react, as well as strengthening our abilities to make sense of events and choose what we do next.

However, the mind isn’t laying dormant otherwise, waiting to simply react to excitement or devastation happening on the outside. Ever since Freud convened the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, the field of psychology has been fascinated by the way the mind spontaneously dreams, both during the day and at night. While Freud contended those dreams existed to make sense of our internal desires, research has pushed our understanding of the human mind along over the intervening decades. Modern research shows that the mind is doing so much more than reacting to stress; it is wondering, inventing, and creating as regular modes of being.

Raising imagination boosts learning and coping for the long term

When we talk about the imagination, we are referring to several functions.² One is the ability to create images or other perceptive information without seeing or experiencing the thing itself, like when we can picture a book character or conjure up the sound of a loved one’s voice from just a photo. Another is the ability to form beliefs without direct sensory evidence, like when we hold religious and spiritual beliefs. Still another is the ability to express ideas and communicate in sensory-based ways, like when we create a work of art with embedded meaning or when we can imagine the ideas that a songwriter intends to convey.

Research shows that these capacities are key in how human beings solve problems, communicate and empathize with one another, and invent new things.³ There is also evidence that creative activities boost the neurophysiological processes that manage stress, similar to other tried-and-true stress busters like exercise.⁴ We know that the human imagination is central to all living and to human evolution; imagination and artfulness are valued in all cultural contexts all over the world. It’s one of the few truly universal human experiences. We are all humans who once charted our stories on cave walls, activists and scholars who persistently dream of worlds unrealized, and the prayerful who look up at the heavens to connect to loved ones lost.

Raising kids today often feels like a game of keep-up where parents are constantly asking therapists like me, Will my child be OK? The landscape of advice responding to this question prioritizes solutions that help parents deal with the stressful thing at hand. Tapping into the power of imagination on a regular basis, however, ensures our kids can learn to resolve problems in the moment and also engage in the bigger, broader purpose of civilization: to dream and create better worlds and evolve. A family habit of raising imagination may just improve parental wellness, too.

Tips for raising imagination at home

Here are some tips to raise your child’s imagination, elevating your young royal changemaker:

1. Open-ended questions: When children face challenges, encourage open-ended thinking. Here are some examples: “That’s a tough one. I wonder what kind of a solution we can come up with. What questions haven’t we asked about the problem? Who else might know something about this?”
2. Dream sharing: Show-don’t-tell your children how to practice a habit of imagination. Wonder out loud, and share your thoughts as they are in progress. It might sound like this: “When I hear the song that’s on the radio, in my mind I start thinking of that time I was at the concert and heard this song. I can almost feel how the floor vibrated and see all the lights when I think about it. It makes me feel so happy!”
3. Creativity rituals: Make artful and creative experiences a regular part of your family’s schedule, ensuring children view the practice of being imaginative as valuable as the many other things we practice, like math homework. Helpful hint: Joy makes new habits and rituals “stick.”