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Home › Articles › Your Toddlers › Imaginations Gone Wild

Imaginations Gone Wild

Fostering Your Toddler's Creative Side

By Laura Cone

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lay hide-and-seek, pull your toddler on a magic carpet ride or hold your toddler while he or she is balanced on a beach ball, Carnes says.

"Parents come to our concept-based creative dance program looking for more than a way to pass the time," she says. "They want to engage their children with new ideas and stimulus, to enhance their kids' growth and development through that wonderful work of children: play."

Carnes says children are constantly seeking to understand the world around them, and by observing how a toddler plays, you can see her cognitive, social and emotional self emerging and exploring.

"Imagination plays much more of a critical role than just playing dress up," Carnes says. "It is through our creativity that we learn our likes and dislikes and grow to appreciate the way others think and feel."

Carnes offers the following tips to inspire imagination in your child:

  1. Play! Find an excuse to put on some music and enjoy transporting yourselves to a new land – maybe a deep-sea dive, a float in space, a travel down a river made of sticky syrup or a lake filled with popcorn. Toddlers can relate to new images, and their vocabulary and linguistic understanding increases with these types of explorations.

  2. Pretending to be big is fun too. As you go about your day, find ways to let your child help you. It can be great fun at the grocery store to look for small grapes and big melons or to take the sofa pillows at home from a low level to a high one as you clean up the living room. Toddlers love to feel like contributing household members, and this beginning dramatic play allows them to better understand the way their world works.

  3. Move! Too much of our culture is centered around sedentary activities, even for small children. Television, videos and computer games are all passive activities that eat up precious amounts of time in a child's day. For any child under 5, the kinesthetic experience should predominate the day. Activities might include running, walking, playing, gardening, biking, swimming, hopping, skipping and dancing.

  4. A little room to explore! Kids have a lot going on in their lives these days but children also need some time to themselves to explore without being directed. Set up some safe spaces in your home and let your child play a little bit on his own each day. It may only be five minutes, but they'll develop inner riches from these moments of self-reflection.

  5. If you are doing an activity with your youngster, siblings or a group, it can be fun to introduce a moment for reflection. Ask your little one's opinion. Let her share with you – even in her limited language – what's on her mind.

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