Nurturing curiosity

Nurturing curiosity in children is one of the items that everyone want to check off their to-do list. It's a good thing to have curious children after all. Being curious about the world around you is more than half the battle of learning things after all. The opposite, a child who seemingly is not interested in anything, is extremely concerning for parents, and with good reason. 

So how do you do it? 

To my mind, it is actually a fairly simple thing, but like with most seemingly simple things, it can be tough to pull off. This is mainly because it asks something of the adults in a child's life. As I see it, nurturing creativity has two parts.

1. Model curiosity. This is actually a life style, family culture issue at heart; certainly more than a buy the right items issue. Really, it comes down to the question: Are the adults in the family curious about things themselves? Do you learn new things? Do you ask questions and find answers? Do you marvel at the world? Do admit to having areas you don't know much about and then delve into that area? Do you ask your children to teach you things that they might know about but you don't? Do you bring home new books or movies or food because it is different and might be interesting? Do you express pleasure and excitement at new knowledge? Do you give yourself time to think and wonder? Do you discuss you new discoveries with your children? [Dinner time is the perfect place for this, to put a plug in for another of my hobby horses.]

The best way to nurture curiosity in your children is to feed (or revive) your own. Pick something you have always wanted to learn to do... learn a foreign language, paint, play an instrument, knit, do woodworking, car repair, study the presidents, understand calculus, build a canoe, write a novel, the list is actually endless. Then do it. It truly doesn't matter if you are good at it or not. Or if it is easy for you or not. Or if you can ever really master it. the only thing that matters is that it interests you and so you learn about it. You do this in the open, where your children can watch and see you struggle and succeed or even fail. You talk about what you are learning with them. You plan out loud how you will go about doing your new learning. 

Then, if they express an interest in something, you come alongside them and help them to figure out how to learn about it; to find the answers to their questions. Do I need to add you do this regardless of what they want to learn about? You may not really care about the thousands of different Pokemon or even think it is something worthwhile to spend time on, but that doesn't matter. If you want to nurture a child's curiosity, then you help them with what they are curious about, not what you want them to be curious about. I guarantee, that one thing really does lead to another, and that initial curiosity will carry them to other places with very little effort as long as they are supported. So you'll help them find books or people to learn from or places to visit or materials to use, and you'll listen to them as they share their excitement over their what they have learned and done. 

And once you have started this, you will begin to notice connections... how what you are interested in meets what they are interested in. You will be amazed at the connections and relationships that vastly different things can have in common and this will spur you all on to even greater curiosity and learning.

2. Provide safety and freedom. We all know, though, that learning new things, even if it is something we are interested in, is not always easy. So the flip side is do the adults model how to navigate challenges to the learning and discovery process? Do you model how to deal with frustration when learning new things? Do you try new things that you might not be very good at immediately? Do you admit when you get things wrong and show how to fix them? Do you demonstrate that it is alright to make mistakes and to fail? Is failure even an option in your home? Is daydreaming seen as laziness? 

It is important to allow children to ask questions about things. Every question has value and these questions are your opportunity to show how to go about finding answers. Once again, it doesn't matter if the question seems silly to you or not, to the child it is probably exceedingly serious. Give them the gift of taking them seriously. It is also important to allow for failure. If a child is afraid of failing, they will cease to try anything. Fear, especially of displeasing a parent, is like a death sentence to curiosity. One of the things which gives me the most hope is when one of my children who have been consumed by fear can start to pay attention to the world around them and start to ask questions about it. It is like seeing some part of them that had been seemingly dead come to life again. 

This freedom to ask questions, try new things, take a chance, to spend time thinking and wondering is the very basis of curiosity. Without them, curiosity will dry up, unexercised or too afraid to come to the surface. You cannot force a child to be curious, but you can model the joy found in learning about this world around us and the people in it. Curiosity is contagious.