Expanding Vision: Nurturing the Imagination of Children

Photo by Archie Binamira

The imagination of children can be greatly nurtured through fictional literature like Ruthanne Nopson’s Little Peggy Lou stories for children and other writings.

Imagination is the prime fuel that drives everyone to pursue their dreams and ignites their desires. This reality is especially true for young children, who have yet to establish a concrete and coherent worldview, only looking at the world through a mishmash of ideas and sentiments they acquired from everyone and everything. 

The creative juices that bubble inside a child’s mind are extremely potent. Every day, a child is thinking up fantastical creatures like dragons and unicorns, or they’re imagining other more bizarre and unique creatures. Whole worlds are made and destroyed inside their heads, and there are entire tapestries of possible futures they have developed for themselves in their little heads. 

While left to their own devices, children will naturally outgrow their overactive imaginations, but if properly guided and tempered, the explosiveness of their creativity can do wonders for their eventual futures. This possibility is why it is extremely important to start expanding the vision and nurturing the imagination of these children. 

Expanding Vision

Having a great deal of imagination and creativity can be quite helpful in navigating the chaos of the modern world. By nurturing the imagination of children, you are implicitly teaching them the skills of:

• Creativity. Imagination is what fuels creativity; it is what gives children the inspiration to follow their dreams and develop better ideals to deal with unique situations. Having some imagination also increases the likelihood of the child pursuing artistic endeavors like writing, painting, music, etc.
• Ingenuity. Imagination helps children understand new perspectives and develop new angles for approaching a problem. This is very important when trying to discover solutions to novel problems, especially those that require outside-the-box thinking that orthodox attitudes might have a harder time dealing with. 
• Empathy. Imagination is a very useful tool for understanding the life experiences and worldviews of others. Because imaginative children are able to place themselves in other perspectives and get a better feel for unfamiliar emotions, they have a more pronounced capacity for reaching out across the aisle and relating with other people. 

Of course, if, instead of nurturing the imagination of children properly, you are provoking or antagonizing them, their imagination slowly becomes warped and twisted, becoming sources of negativity and inducing in children these attributes:

• Anxiety. If guided well, imagination easily leads to quite a positive outlook on the world and a healthy dose of optimism. Otherwise, having an overactive imagination leads to negatively extrapolating events and looking at the world with an overly cautious and pessimistic lens. Anxious children are quick to place themselves at fault for everything or as unworthy of anything positive happening to their lives. 
• Dreaminess. A negative outcome of having a great deal of imagination is also the reality that it becomes difficult to focus on things. Children with overactive and unguided imaginations are prone to daydreaming all day, getting either too distracted to do anything or too engrossed in their fantasies to properly differentiate between real life and their mindscape. 
• Separateness. If you have a great imagination, regardless of whether you’re thinking up good or bad things, chances are you spend a whole lot of time inside your head, either because you have a hard time dealing with the real world or because you have built it up inside your head that there is nothing worth anything in your physical life. A life primarily spent inside the head also makes it hard to relate to other people and look at things from their perspective.

Nurturing the Imagination of Children

While watching films or reading Little Peggy Lou stories for children are great aids in nurturing the imagination, it is extremely important to find balance. Let your children indulge in their imaginations, but do not forget to pull them out and help them evaluate what they are dreaming up about. Let them enjoy their creativity and their imagination, but remember to always help them in grounding themselves. 

Nurturing the imagination of children is very important, but it is essential to do so with a proper understanding of the stakes involved and the necessity of guiding them well.