Kids losing their imagination?

[fireheart17]

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/o...-1226420413335

The gist of the article is referring to the lack of imagination and creativity we are instilling in our kids.

Thoughts?

[Rapscallion]

You first

Rapscallion

[siead_lietrathua]

they still have imagination, but it has been stifled. problem is, most of the DIY toys that we played with when we were kids, like the tin can phones, required an adult's help. with both parents working, and the other household stuff when they get home, it's probably easier for them to get storebought toys than expend the time to make it themselves. plus it's less of a mess giving them a toy than to break out the craft glue and glitter.

[mikoyan29]

when I was a kid, I had a bunch of the Star Wars figures but my parents only bought me a couple of the ships. So if I wanted Han and Chewie to go galivanting, I had to build ships for them. The point being that even though their are pre-bought toys out there, those can be a spring board to other things. Same thing with guns...my mom would never let me have toy guns....so sticks had to become an acceptable substitute for me. Of course, I would love it when I would find a stick that didn't require much work....

Personally, I think the bigger killer of imagination is the prevalance of video games. When I was growing up, if I wanted to be a fighter pilot, I had to pretend either using swings or my bike or whatever...(Hell, I still do that in my Neon....) now you can just pop in a video game....

[ngc_7331]

I think another problem is those parents who jam pack their kids lives full of every activity that they can think of. Kids just don't have time for imagination, they're too tired at the end of the day.

[AdminAssistant]

Personally, I think the bigger killer of imagination is the prevalance of video games. When I was growing up, if I wanted to be a fighter pilot, I had to pretend either using swings or my bike or whatever...(Hell, I still do that in my Neon....) now you can just pop in a video game....

I don't buy that. Anecdotes don't equal data, but, my nephew (7) loves...LOVES...video games. The only way it's affected his imagination is that it's given him new worlds to imagine himself in. He plays Mario on the Wii, but also 'plays' Mario elsewhere.

I think ngc is more on the money, kids are just too over scheduled.

[powerboy]

Some kids and young adults do not have imagination.

[Amanita]

I can attest to this- I got into it on a cosplay forum with one member, who most likely couldn't be more than 14.
I've been doing artwork personifying skyscrapers ever since I was a kid, and recently I've been turning some of those drawings and concepts into costumes.

This child flat out told me that if she saw me at a convention "cosplaying a building", she would take that as a sign that I was "crazy and to be avoided".
She flat out could NOT comprehend cosplaying as anything that wasn't a pre-made character, and couldn't wrap her head around the concept of personification in general- if it didn't have a face, she couldn't understand how anyone could see any kind of personality or character there. And she had no qualms at all telling me this in the nastiest way possible, complete with ignorant comments about mental illness and such.

Yeah, I told her off back, condemning her overall ignorance as well as how offensive she was being towards the genuinely mentally ill.

On a similar note, a friend of mine does personification artwork too, and one night we were talking about how every time we log into deviantart, Anime styled stuff is always on the front page. "It's pervasive" my friend said. "It's sad, really. These kids just want to copy that one drawing style instead of finding their own artistic style".

And I agree with NGC too, about the overscheduling and lack of opportunity for unstructured play. When a kid's every activity is structured one way or the other, with somebody else making the rules, when is a kid supposed to develop ideas of their own?

[Andara Bledin]

Video games make a great scapegoat, but that's all they are - an easy target to blame and an easy "fix" to make things right.

But I think ngc is closer to the truth. Kids don't have time to have imaginations. During school, they get up, go to school, and more often than not are locked into a specific thought process for the entire day. Then after that it's sports, band, etc until the parents get home. Then it's dinner and homework and maybe some down time before it's off to bed.

Plus, unless it's an art class, kids aren't allowed to express their creativity in class. Even if they've finished the day's lesson, they have to re-hash what they already know. No drawing, or writing, or even reading for pleasure or it's off to detention with you. What kind of message is that?

Also, some people just can't deal with the abstract; that's nothing new. The girl with the problem with anthropomorphic buildings probably has the same issue with ambulatory trees and seeing images in fluffy clouds. She's likely got some mild case of some flavor of autism; not enough for anybody to look for a diagnosis, but enough to affect her ability to deal with the abstract.

^-.-^

[MrsEclipse]

Re: video games and imagination. I can't get to where I originally read this, because I don't have access to that library anymore, but I'll try and find some information again to support this theory I heard of.

Basically, the way I read it was, video games aren't great for young kids developing an imagination and a relationship with their surroundings (this goes all the way through elementary school and even into the early teen years.) The way it goes is this: kids need to explore the world and learn how things cause and effect when they do things. They need to explore every aspect of the playground and integrate it into their developing minds. Stuff like that. Video games, even ones that say they're completely immersive, can never be as detailed or interactive as the real world, and if kids spend too much time exploring a pretend world and doing the limited things it allows and not enough time exploring the real world, their interactions are going to become stifled and they'll be accustomed to only thinking of one way to do things.

Limiting a kid's video game time is a good step towards increasing their imaginative capacity, but that's all it is- a single step. There are a lot of other factors that come in to play.

[mikoyan29]

I guess I didn't mean to blame video games as the sole source of stifling imagination but I still imagine they are a big factor in it. But I will agree with the other poster in that if you are playing a video game you aren't immersing yourself in the real world and seeing what it has to offer. But then again, the same thing could be said if you are at soccer practice, music practice or whatever other practices kids are scheduled for these days. I seem to remember reading an article sometime ago about how unstructured playtime is as important in learning as many of the other activities.

I will say that video games do teach a degree of creativity but as long as you solve the problem the way the game wants you to solve the problem.

[Mytical]

Somebody else alluded to it. Take a remote controlled car vs a hot wheels. The hot wheels you have to imagine (and hand make) the movement, the remote controlled .. not so much. Toys have become more .. automated..less imaginative. Now of course everybody is different, but I can remember a time that two sticks could provide thousands of different things...I show two sticks to my nieces and nephews..and they see two sticks.

[Amanita]

I wouldn't even say it's autism that was responsible for the behavior of that girl who was so hateful to me- Some so-called "Geeks" are just plain poorly socialized. Neurotypical, just not socialized to respect other people, ideas, or property, and were probably not taught basic manners either.

I for one, am not a fan of games where there is one, and only one way around an obstacle. I've never gotten very far in the PC version of "Star Wars: The Force Unleashed" because to move to my next objective, I have to use ONE specific jumping move that I just can't nail the timing for. There's no way to creatively work around the problem, to use my force powers to grab some random junk and build myself a platform a little closer to my objective, for example.

So I'm stuck at that one stage, with no way to go further. Likewise, Prince of Persia- the sands of time. There's only one ridiculously complicated move that will get me to where I need to be, again, no alternate paths or workarounds. So I'm stuck at it.

[Nekojin]

Somebody else alluded to it. Take a remote controlled car vs a hot wheels. The hot wheels you have to imagine (and hand make) the movement, the remote controlled .. not so much. Toys have become more .. automated..less imaginative. Now of course everybody is different, but I can remember a time that two sticks could provide thousands of different things...I show two sticks to my nieces and nephews..and they see two sticks.

And the Hot Wheels are more durable and less expensive.

I remember one year that my grandmother got me a radio-controlled car. While playing with it outside my house, I let a neighbor kid try it out, and he ended up power-sliding it into the side of a truck tire, and cracked the chassis so completely that it simply wasn't repairable. It was a $200 toy, ruined through carelessness. With Hot Wheels, even if the tracks got damaged, it was hard as hell to actually damage the cars beyond the point of functioning.

[TheHuckster]

I think imagination and creativity are two distinct things that are equally important.

Imagination is the ability to make believe something is something that it isn't. When I was young I had a ton of matchbox and hot wheel cars and used the surroundings to my benefit. The pool table was a stadium. The hutch was a skyscraper. And so forth. That's imagination.

Creativity is the ability to craft things into what you wanted. I would take time to take an ordinary piece of paper and fold it into a simple house that was on the Matchbox scale. With enough paper, I could build an entire town that I could design building by building. Sometimes the road layout would be one way, other times another way. That's creativity.

I think that, while imagination might be getting lost thanks to more lifelike cars, dolls, and computer games, creativity hasn't necessarily gone down the wayside. Legos require a lot of creativity, as do some video games such as The Sims and Sim City. These all still exist and remain popular.

That being said, there are a ton of games and toys that aren't particularly thought-provoking, but it's another one of those things where it's up to the parent to limit those games and encourage more creativity. I do hope when I have kids they have the same strive for creativity and imagination as I did.