Is Creativity in Decline?

One of my favorite things about the neighborhood where we now live is the communal space where all the kids play.

It’s an experimental urban mixed-income project made up of townhomes and rehabilitated historic homes, and the design includes a few courtyards that have become the hub of excitement for my kids.  The most-asked question on any given day (especially in the summer) goes something like, “When can we play outside?” followed by “Can we ask (insert the name of any favorite friend of the day) to play?”

One of the things I love about that is the ways this communal outside play fosters creativity.  The neighborhood kids are forever dreaming up schemes of all sorts—spy plots, bug hunts, weddings, school, and the like.  Sometimes they’re a little too ambitious with their creativity, in fact, and we’ve had to shut down some over-the-top plans.

This recent article from Newsweek highlights the importance of such play in kids’ lives.  While IQ scores have been going up with each generation, creativity scores are now falling among American kids.  The most serious decline is among K-6^th grade kids since 1990.  Yes, that means our youth groups (and younger staff/volunteer teams) are impacted by this decline in creative thinking.  The authors point out:

Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.

As we face our own students in ministry this week, let’s be sure we’re not just another place where questions get squashed and information gets pushed.  Let’s also not settle for the entertainment backstops that fill time and space like so much other unimaginative fluff in kids’ lives.  Instead, what if youth group becomes the place where creativity is unleashed, where questions are welcomed, and where God’s Kingdom dreams are dreamed?

©2010 Fuller Youth Institute