Does the nature of 21st century childhood — from often prodigious screen time to overscheduled out-of-school time — impinge upon children's imaginations and creativity?
Research has shown that social media can disrupt social development, a phenomenon that could indirectly impact imagination, according to Andrew Shtulman, professor and psychology department chair at Occidental College, in California. But merely using a screen doesn’t necessarily negatively affect creativity, he said. In fact, it could enhance a child’s imagination depending on what they’re doing.
Concerns about screen time dampening imagination date to the early days of television, said Naomi Aguiar, associate director of the Ecampus Research Unit at Oregon State University.
Tweens in particular, but even younger children as well, face tradeoffs in how screen time or after-school activities foster creativity, social relationships and cognitive development, she said. Yet imagination thrives when children are bored and have unstructured time in which to come up with their own activities, she added.
Shtulman, author of “Learning to Imagine: the Science of Discovering New Possibilities,” said both screen time and scheduled activities can provide fodder for enhancing a child’s imagination.
“If your parents put you in math classes when you’re learning drill-and-kill addition problems, that’s probably not going to help you become an imaginative person,” he said. But if organized pursuits “expose you to lots of different experiences and opportunities for learning, it could improve imagination.”
The concerns, Shtulman said, may be “less about content and more about not allowing kids the freedom to explore because their activities are so constrained. They’re sitting in front of a screen and not getting to interact with peers.”
Ultimately, whether those worries are about screen time or overscheduling, “it depends upon what you’re doing in that time,” he said.
Peer interaction is key
Providing opportunity throughout the week for peer interactions is key to building imagination with pretend games — which adults sometimes might assume are fantastical but are often actually based on real-world scenarios, Shtulman said.
For example, he said, younger children may play: “I’m the waiter, and you’re the customer" or “I’m the doctor, and you’re the patient."
"And then they explore what it’s like to do those things and have different powers, authority structures and relationships," he said. "That kind of activity is definitely helpful for improving your social imagination.”
Educators should allow time for and facilitate this pretend play, but not impose their own scenarios, Shtulman said.
“There’s tremendous value in simulating reality with your peers,” he said, adding that ideally, educators can go beyond just pretending. “Children appreciate having experiences to use tools rather than just pretend to use tools, to actually cook food rather than pretend to cook food.”
Aguiar, co-author of the book, “Imaginary Friends and the People Who Create Them,” said that while lessening the use of technology might be unpopular with some teachers, “We’ve got to get the screens out of school. For many children, that’s the only place that’s protected."
She said she knows educators are under tremendous pressure to prepare children for the 21st century workforce. But in the age of artificial intelligence, "the thing that helps human beings thrive are strong relational networks. And screens not only disrupt cognitive functioning, they disrupt relational networks. We’ve got to protect that space.”
Instead, educators should create collaborative learning opportunities, like giving students a story stem — where they're given the beginning of a story and tasked with continuing it — and asking them to bounce ideas off one another, Aguiar said.
“There are no rules on what the story has to be,” she said. “Focus on process rather than product.”
