Children's creativity

Yelyzaveta Hrechaniuk
Book Chapter
Cite this chapter as:
Hrechaniuk, Y. Children's creativity, In Sparrman, A. (ed.), Making culture:
Children's and young people's leisure cultures, Göteborg: Kulturanalys Norden;
2019, pp. 28-32. ISBN: 9789187046605
Copyright: Kulturanalys Norden

The self-archived postprint version of this journal article is available at Linköping

University Institutional Repository (DiVA):
[Link]
Children’s creativity
Yelyzaveta Hrechaniuk

Introduction
Creativity alongside play has become the western world’s panacea (Cook 2018).
Because of this and because ideas and ideals of creativity are rooted in children’s
everyday lives, it is important to view them critically. In this chapter, I ask: How
can we think about children’s creativity? The concept gives an impression of
creativity being children’s own and seems to indicate that children define and have
command of their creativity. While this is certainly partially true, an adult – a
parent or a teacher – is more likely to define who and what is creative or uncreative
rather than the children themselves. When these adults have conflicting ideas about
what makes an object or a person creative, the complexity of children’s creativity
becomes especially visible.

My approach in this text is that children are not born creative, but they become
creative through everyday practices – not least through leisure activities such as
competitions, arts and crafts workshops, and extracurricular activities. Children are
thus made creative and/or uncreative by how they are spoken and written about
and the praise and prizes they receive from families, juries, and teachers.

Using the example of a children’s drawing competition, I will explore how

different perspectives on creativity can simultaneously make the exact same
drawing into a genuine imaginative expression and a seemingly ‘fake’ imitation.
A discussion of one of the drawings from the competition on social media captures
the tension between three versions of creativity, showing that the concept is far
from universal or self-evident.

Children’s creativity in research

The literature on creativity and children’s creativity encompasses fields as diverse
as psychology, business studies, education, cultural studies, anthropology, and
childhood studies. Theories of creativity are often contradictory, however. Take,
for example, the arguments of two key figures in psychology and education – Jean
Piaget (2002), to whom childhood is the most creative time within the lifespan of
an individual, and Lev Vygotsky (2004), who argues that children’s creative
imagination is no richer than that of adults. For Piaget (2002), creativity is an
“inborn aptitude” (p. 221), something the child ‘has’ and can potentially lose when
they become socialised into norms and values. The inventiveness and curiosity that
Piaget (2002) connects with creativity are only “deformed by adult society” (p.
229). Vygotsky (2004) argues against seeing creative imagination as an internal
process and acknowledges the role of environment, although he still claims that a

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child’s and adult’s imaginations function differently. He connects creative
imagination to experience and skills, which small children especially have less of
simply by virtue of being young. In this line of thinking, imagination is “fully
mature only in the adult” (Vygotsky 2004, p. 32). While Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s
ideas have certainly been highly influential, I wonder whether creativity theories
require an opposition between children and adults, measuring who has more or
‘better’ imagination. Is there a way to think about children’s creativity other than
in terms of age, development, or socialisation?

Most research seems to agree that in the western world children’s creativity is
considered ‘good’ and valuable (Aronsson 1984). Karin Aronsson (1984) notes
that ‘exhibiting’ children’s creativity – hanging children’s drawings in the kitchen
or living room – is a common and nearly compulsory practice in many western
homes. However, for many immigrant parents in Sweden this is not a given, which
shows how differently the (aesthetic) value of children’s creativity is performed in
everyday practices (ibid.). Outside of the western world, children’s creativity is
equally highly valued, but there might be less separation between children’s and
adults’ creative activities (ibid.). What if we think about children’s creativity as a
space for both children and adults?

Thinking anew
More recent theories offer an understanding of creativity as a social practice. This
means that age or development are not seen as the main criteria for what counts as
creative. Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam (2007) argue that creativity is first and
foremost a relational process that is part of our everyday lives. Creativity is not
something to have, but something to do – it is distributed across everyday activities
and practices. Because it is not contained either within the creative person or
product, the burden (or privilege) of being creative does not fall on the shoulders
of a single individual, whether a child or an adult. Instead, creativity is relational
and collective and is done through engaging with the people, objects, and materials
around us (Ingold & Hallam 2007). Rooting creative improvisation in everyday
practices allows Ingold and Hallam (2007) to question the idea of novelty and to
argue that imitation and copying are no less creative. ‘Standard’ psychological
definitions of creativity tend to emphasise novelty as its defining feature (e.g. in
Runco and Jaeger 2012), implying that creativity stands opposite to imitation.
Instead, Ingold and Hallam (2007) say that imitation is not a mechanical process
of making an exact duplicate but always includes improvisation. The following
discussion shows what happens when these distinct perspectives meet in practice.

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What makes a child’s drawing creative?

Figure 1. Screenshot of the drawing on Facebook page of Ikea Australia, 29

November 2018, ©Inter IKEA Systems, B. V.

One of the leisure time activities that many children engage in is competitions. I
borrow an example from the international drawing competition organised by the
Swedish company Ikea for children up to 12 years old. In the Australian round of
the competition, one of the drawings published on Ikea Australia’s Facebook page
sparked a controversy (fig. 1). Some users commented that the drawing is creative
and even ingenious, while others claimed that it is an uncreative copy. How can
one drawing be both at the same time? This becomes less surprising if we look
closer at the different ideas about children’s creativity in the comments.

The drawing shows a character that 8-year old Stephanie (pseudonym) calls
Fairybread Kitty. The character is a combination of a blue cat and fairy bread, a
popular Australian dessert of sliced bread covered in sprinkles. Out of nearly 100
public comments on Facebook, the majority praise the child and her imagination:
“Awesome design! Such a creative girl!” (Ikea Australia 2017). A smaller critical
group of comments questions the creativity of both the drawing and the child:
“Fairybread kitty is almost a copyright infringement! some kid has been watching
too much youtube [sic]” (Ikea Australia 2016b). Several users have spotted a
resemblance between Fairybread Kitty and the popular meme character Nyan Cat
(Means TV 2011). But the resemblance only becomes problematic if imitation is
opposed to creativity, if novelty and uniqueness define creativity. But if imitation
is seen as equally creative, the question of who is copying what and which
character came first is no longer important. Several commenters express this last
idea of creativity, which is closest to Ingold and Hallam’s (2007). They

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acknowledge the similarity between two characters but do not deny Fairybread
Kitty its creative value. What they praise is Stephanie’s improvisation in adding to
her character an ‘Aussie’ element, the fairy bread. Ikea’s drawing competition is
an example of how children’s creativity is negotiated in practice by everybody but
the children themselves. The controversy around Fairybread Kitty illustrates
tensions between creativity as an individual property and a collective process. The
adults’ grappling with issues of originality, novelty, and ownership shows that the
concept of children’s creativity is diverse, conflicting, and fluid.

Children are continuously encouraged to engage in creative activities: at school

and preschool, in supermarkets, and even churches many of which have play
corners equipped with paper and coloured pens. Because ideas and ideals of
creativity are rooted in children’s everyday lives, it is important to critically view
them in a similar way that child studies have scrutinised innocence, agency, and
other normative ideas about children (see e.g. James & Prout 1997; Prout 2005). I
call for the need to consider and reconsider what notions of creativity and children
we bring into children’s creativity both in theory and in practice. If children’s
creativity is disputed in practice, is there any reason why it should appear
homogenous and stable in research, policy documents, and institutional practices?
Ingold and Hallam (2007) offer a broad and inclusive notion of creativity as part
of children’s and adults’ everyday activities and relationships. If we approach
children’s creativity as they do, it remains important to consider what notions of
children and childhood we combine it with. Is it, for example, a passive or agentive
child? There is a need for adults to keep on asking how creativity can be understood
in relation to children and what claims it is possible to make about the role of
creativity in children’s lives.

References
Aronsson, K. 1984. Bildkod och barns bilder: Om den organiserade fantasin. In:
Aronsson, Cederblad, Dahl, Olsson & Sandin (eds) Barn i tid och rum. Malmö:
Liber Förlag.

Cook, D. T. 2018. Panaceas of Play: Stepping Past the Creative Child. In:
Spyrou, Rosen & Cook (eds) Reimagining Childhood Studies. 1st edn. London:
Bloomsbury Academic.

Ikea Australia. 2016a. 16 November. Available at:

[Link]
38288/?type=3&theater, accessed 29/11/2018.

Ikea Australia. 2016b. 16 November. Available at:

[Link]
977503288, accessed 29/11/2018.

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Ikea Australia. 2017. 27 January. Available at:
[Link]
/?type=1&theater, accessed 29/11/2018.

Ingold, T. & Hallam, E. 2007. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation: An

Introduction. In: Hallam and Ingold (eds) Creativity and Cultural Improvisation.
New York: Berg.

James, A. & Prout, A. 1997. Introduction. In: James & Prout (eds) Constructing
and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of
Childhood. 2nd edn. London: Falmer.

Means TV. 2011. Nyan Cat [original]. Available at:

[Link] accessed 08/05/2019.
Piaget, J. 2002. Creativity. In: Gallagher & Reid (eds) The Learning Theory of
Piaget and Inhelder. New York: Authors choice.

Prout, A. 2005. The Future of Childhood. 1st edn. London: Routledge Falmer.

Runco, M. A. & Jaeger, G. J. 2012. The Standard Definition of Creativity.

Creativity Research Journal, 24 (1): 92–96.

Vygotsky, L. S. 2004. Imagination and Creativity in Childhood. Journal of

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