Your kid just spent 45 minutes building something out of toilet paper rolls, tape, and an old cardboard box.

You have no idea what it is.

They're absolutely glowing.

That moment is worth more than you probably realize.

Here's something that took me a while to get my head around: creativity isn't a personality type. It's not something kids either have or don't have — the artsy kid, the imaginative one, the child who turns literal garbage into something and calls it a masterpiece.

Creativity is more like a behavior that shows up when the conditions feel right.

It shows up when a kid feels free enough to try something without knowing how it will turn out.

That's it. That feeling of safety — to experiment, to guess wrong, to make something strange — is what produces creative thinking. Which means it can be encouraged. And it can also be quietly switched off, usually without anyone meaning to do that.

Think about what separates a creative project from homework:

This is probably why a child who flat-out refuses to touch their homework can spend three hours drawing a comic strip no one asked for. The stakes feel completely different. There's nothing to get wrong. No one grading it.

When there's no wrong answer to protect against, the same brain that was "checked out" starts generating ideas on its own. It’s a noticeable shift.

Not all creative activities are equal.

The ones that tend to build real creative thinking have a few things in common: open outcomes, room to mess up and try again, and something the child can physically touch and change.

Drawing and open art

Blank paper beats coloring books here, by a lot. When there's no template, the brain has to generate the whole idea on its own. What will it be? What color? How big? Every one of those tiny decisions is creative thinking in action.

You don't need a special art kit. Paper and a pencil are genuinely enough.

Building with random stuff

Cardboard. Tape. String. Old boxes. Rubber bands. Popsicle sticks. These beat most purpose-built toys for building creative capacity — because they don't come with instructions. The child has to decide what they even are. That moment of deciding is exactly where the skill lives.

(Those step-by-step building kits teach real things too, but they're working a different muscle entirely.)

Making up stories

Kids who make up stories — whether they write them, act them out, or just narrate them aloud to the dog — are doing some of the most sophisticated thinking kids do. They're holding multiple characters in mind at once, inventing cause and effect, solving problems as they go.

You don't need to prompt it. You mostly just need to not interrupt it.

Cooking and kitchen experiments

This one doesn’t always get recognized as creative, but it is. Cooking is creative problem-solving: measuring, predicting, adjusting when something goes sideways. When a kid is allowed to actually experiment in the kitchen — "what happens if we add more of this?" — they're doing exactly what a creative thinker does.

Same principle as the baking soda and vinegar moment. Something real happens. The child caused it. That loop is powerful.

Making noise without a lesson

Banging on pots. Strumming without knowing any chords. Making up a song and performing it to no audience in particular. This is different from music lessons, which have their own value. Unstructured music-making treats sound as a material to experiment with — something to rearrange, try differently, see what comes out.

If you have a piano or keyboard available, try having your kid create a song using just black keys. This is something I used to do with my piano students and it is almost impossible to sound bad. Very empowering!

This is worth slowing down on, because the differences can be subtle, but important:

The thread running through all of this: anything that shifts control away from the child tends to reduce creative output. And it's not because parents are doing something wrong — it's just instinct. You see your kid struggling and you want to help. Of course you do.

But the moment a creative project starts to feel like a test, a lot of kids pull back. There’s a consistent pattern here: when people feel like their work is being evaluated, intrinsic motivation drops. Kids are no different. The risk-taking stops. And risk-taking is kind of the whole point.

Boredom is often where creativity starts.

A kid with nothing to do will, eventually, find something. Coming up with something from nothing is one of the most important creative skills there is.

If we skip that step by handing them an activity, they don’t get the practice.

Filling every gap is understandable. Every parent has been there. But give boredom a few minutes before you solve it. That cardboard spaceship probably didn't come from a scheduled creative hour. It came from a Tuesday afternoon with absolutely nothing going on.

If you've read this far and started counting how many creative projects your kid did lately — that's not what this is about.

This isn't a checklist. You don't need a dedicated art corner or a labeled bin of "loose parts" or a color-coded creative schedule.

What you actually need is less than you think. Paper. A few things that can be taped together. A mess that’s allowed to happen.

And a willingness to say, “I don’t know — what do you think?” instead of reaching for the answer.

The parents who tend to feel most behind on this stuff are usually the ones paying the closest attention. That's not a failure. That's just what caring looks like up close.

You're probably not missing some crucial creative activity. You're probably just one Tuesday afternoon of nothing-to-do away from a cardboard spaceship.

Put out some random materials — paper, tape, cardboard tubes, whatever you’ve got — and say nothing. No instructions. No “what are you going to make?” Just leave them there.

Then step back and see what happens.

If this clicked for you, the article Why Kids Stop Loving Learning is worth a read — it goes deeper into what actually brings curiosity back when it's gone quiet.

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