How do we ignite that creative spark in our kids that is so important for them to reach their potential? A favourite blogger of mine, Eric Barker, looks at the research behind How to be a Better Parent. To make your kids more ethical and successful, he turns to Adam Grant, the youngest tenured professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the New York Times bestseller, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives our Success. The 4 secrets to this question were:

1 Ask kids “What Harry Potter would do?”

Grant found that the best career role models, oddly enough, come from fiction.

“Growing up, many originals find their first role models in their most beloved novels, where protagonists exercise their creativity in pursuit of unique accomplishments. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel each chose Lord of the Rings, the epic tale of a hobbit’s adventures to destroy a dangerous ring of power. Sheryl Sandberg and Jeff Bezos both favoured A Wrinkle in Time, in which a young girl learns to bend the laws of physics and travel through time. Mark Zuckerberg was partial to Ender’s Game, where it is up to a group of kids to save the planet from an alien attack.”

He states that kids who go on to mould the future of the world we live in need to see past the day to day and dream of what might be possible. Sometimes fiction is better for sparking the imagination than reality is.

My memory of something fictional that caught my imagination and still does when I’m sitting in traffic was the cartoon The Jetsons. They could fly around in their jet-powered vehicles. Just think, no need for roads or traffic lights, we could just plug coordinates into our Navigator and off we would go. Not quite as quick as apparating, but convenient none the less!

Grant concludes that little wizards can be a big help in getting kids to do the right thing.

2 Emphasise values over rules

While research showed that most families have an average of six rules for children, those families whose children scored in the top 5% for creativity tended to come from households with, on average, less than one rule. The families of kids who were less creative typically had six rules.

Grant reasons that by emphasizing values over rules, it starts a good conversation about right and wrong. This allows children to internalise their ethics and they are more likely to do the right thing because they generate rules for themselves.

In those families that mention creativity, the emphasis was not on “This is what you do because I say so,” it was, “These are principles that we believe in and here’s why we think they’re important. What do you think? There was reflective dialogue going on. Because of that, kids took ownership of the values and essentially made some of the very rules that the less creative parents were busy trying to enforce.

So, get values right and they’ll build rules themselves.

3 Praise character, Not actions

Grant believes that we should not praise our children’s actions, but rather we should praise their character. This is because when they see good behaviour as part of their identity, they’re more likely to make good choices in the future.

So if your kid does something kind…instead of telling them “What you did was nice”…say “You’re a really nice person.”

Again, this helps them to internalise that behaviour as part of their identity so that the next time they have a chance to consider “Do I want to share or help?”, they think, “That’s who I am”.

Grant notes that this also works on the negative side as well. Instead of saying “Don’t cheat”, you should say, “Don’t be a cheater”…and you will literally cut cheating in half.

Likewise, Grant notes that when you ask kids “to be helpers” instead of “to help”, they are up to 29% more likely to clean up after themselves.

4 Explain how bad behaviour affects others

Finally, Grant states that when you punish kids for bad behaviours, if you just stop there, then there’s a big risk that they don’t understand why the behaviour was wrong. What parents who do a really good job teaching moral values do is they explain “This is how your behaviour hurt others”. Think about what kind of pain this child was in when you hit him.” This helps kids develop both empathy and guilt…that Grant calls the “king and queen of moral emotions”.

Empathy will make kids want to right the wrong that they’ve done. Guilt has this anticipation effect where it feels really bad to have this remorse over “Gosh, I did something wrong.” Next time they are in that situation, they want to make sure they don’t do that again.

Studies show that people who feel guilt are better leaders and better friends.

Grant notes that both empathy and guilt will forge them into awesome adults.

Kids are born with a creative spark

Grant notes that it is “far, far easier to extinguish the creative spark of a child than it is to light that spark. “ The good news, he says, is that kids are born with that spark. They have a natural urge to ask questions, to create and to explore. At the end of the day, we as parents, just need to avoid getting in the way.”

The Inicio Album helps you:

1.   highlighting your child’s good characteristics and observed strengths;

2.  teach age-appropriate values to build a healthy mindset with the use of quotes once a year; and

3.  Know what is really important to your child by having them select prompts from more than 250 labels, quotes and prompts.