Adventures With Dollhouses

When it comes to imagination, there are no right or wrong
answers for the most part.

  When it comes to imagination, there are no right or wrong
answers for the most part. Encouraging imagination in children
is a vital component to their development and parents play an
important role in determining that imagination by encouraging
it. When parents do not encourage imagination in their children,
they run the risk of hampering the development of many important
mental capacities that children develop through the experience
of play.

Allowing children to have adventures in their own minds using
creative tools, such as dollhouses or other miniature worlds, is
an important piece of the child raising puzzle. It is important
to encourage children to use their minds in play situations, as
this encourages the emergence of rules, regulations, creative
thinking, and problem solving. Far too often, children lack
those skills upon entering the most basic of life situations
because of the parent's desire to have their children become in
touch with "reality" as early as possible. This is often
referred to as "tough love" and is certainly not suitable for
young children.

There are many practices that discourage the use of children's
imagination and abstract skills.

Television and Computers

Too often in the modern world, it is common to have passive
parenting skills take charge. Parents often park their children
in front of the television or computer for hours on end as a
result of the busy lifestyle they lead. As a result, the
children become engaged in what is largely an inactive medium.
This hampers creativity immeasurably.

This passive action takes its place in the form that the
children do not need to act in order for there to be action.
Instead, action occurs as a result of the simple click of a
button. This diminishes children's learning capacity to view the
world as an interactive place and can place unrealistic demands
on the life experience of children. The passive nature of
television or computer games often leads to a lack of physical
play in children as well.

Teaching Techniques

Believe it or not, some teaching techniques can stifle the
ability of children to imagine and work with their creativity.
Rigid teaching systems that teach conceptual skills are often
the culprit here, as children learn endlessly from passive
workbooks and are not taught critical interaction and
imagination skills. This form of learning is common in early-age
schoolchildren and commonly teaches children principles through
verbal instruction rather than allowing children to learn
principles through active participation.

A big part of the problem with this is that nothing is actually
actively learned in a physical sense. Children learn from
experience, by and large, and rely on life experiences to teach
them what they need to know. The universal example of the child
touching the stove several times to figure out that it is hot is
a clear example of this type of learning style. Children that do
not learn by doing often do not learn as successfully as those
that learn through experience.

So the next time children are interacting with a dollhouse and
playing with dolls in an imaginary sense, sit down and interact
with them. Adults in these frenzied modern times have a lot to
learn from children who have the ability to learn creatively and
intelligently.

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