Act like an adult and think like a child


  • February 25, 2016
  • /   Reggie Dogan
  • /   education

Marie Prestwood and Finley Krantz look at butterflies hatching in their VPK class at the Gonzalez United Methodist Child Enrichment Center in Cantonment, Fl. Wednesday, April 29, 2015. (Michael Spooneybarger/ Pensacola Today)

Ever watched a child dance or sing?

As the adage by American author William Purkey goes: "You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching ... sing like there's nobody listening."

This is exactly how children do it. It may not be in time to the music, and it may not look very cool, but it's as spontaneous and as free as it gets.

Erika Christakis believes that adults can become better learners and teachers by paying closer attention to the experiences of young children.

Christakis has spent decades with children in school settings. Studying them both as educator and scientist.

A former preschool teacher and director, Christakis now is a child-development specialist at Yale University.

In “The Power of Thinking Like a Preschooler,” Christakis talked about the importance of adults finding the child in themselves and paying closer attention to the way they experience the world.

The idea is for grownups to act like adults, but think like a child.

Creative-thinking techniques are designed to remove the constraints of logic and free the imagination to become creative again.

Pablo Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

The real value of re-learning creative techniques is to do just that — to learn how to think like a child again.

As we become adults, we lose the spontaneity and innocence of our youth. Grownups become timid and afraid, believing there is only one answer to a problem and it’s devastating to make a mistake.

Children, on the other hand, have no idea about these arbitrary rules; they are more chaotic and willing to search for many different answers.

As we grow older and start making sense of the world that surrounds us or become experts in our fields, our brains become a blessing and a curse. A blessing because we can quickly grasp the complexity of our surroundings, understand how things connect together logically, and become adept at sensing and trimming the nonsensical ideas.

Yet, it’s a curse because, by piling up restraints and filtering out early ideas for the reason that they don’t directly abide by some logical rules, we end up with uncreative ideas and solutions whose best redeeming value is that they conform to the mold that we wanted to escape.

The lack of creativity has filtered down to our children, Christakis believes.

In a Q & A in The Atlantic, Christakis shares with Lauren Cassini Davis her thoughts on ways adults can help children succeed in early education and improve their own creativity at the same time:

As a consequence of what she described as an “academic takeover” of early learning in America, kids, she argued, are becoming less inquisitive and engaged than kids of earlier generations, often failing to develop sophisticated language skills. But these early-education issues rarely are a result of parents and preschool teachers lacking goodwill, she said. Rather, they stem from, and perhaps in some ways symbolize, the trouble adults have in understanding children’s needs and inner lives—a deficit in the “recognition of young children as unique people with their own ideas, their own feelings, their own thoughts and tastes and experiences.”

Read “The Power of Thinking Like Preschooler Question & Answer here.

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