Recommended Reading: The Creativity Crisis - A Newsweek Article

A fascinating article by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman on Newsweek talks about the slow but noticeable and steady dwindling of creativity among American children. This alarming trend has been studied and is very worrisome.

What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

The advantage we have here as homeschooling parents is that it gives us greater leeway and opportunities to foster imagination and creativity in our children. But I think all parents should take this seriously. How creative can children be when they are constantly stimulated by outside forces. The TV, the PC, Nintendo, PS3, X-Box I could go on an on. We let them turn on the TV or videogame just so they stop whining at us.
For what it's worth my children play with more imagination than some of their playmates but after reading this article I cannot help but be convinced that I have to provide them with more guidance and inspiration to be imaginative and creative.