Developing Imagination

If you’re here as a parent, what I’m about to say is not going to be surprising in the least, but I know that a lot of parents need to hear it, or read it, at least; you need to develop your child’s imagination.

Now, I don’t want to be preachy, and I’ll try not to be, but one of the things that we as parents often forget to do, is to help our children develop. Yes, caring for them, catering to their needs, that’s all necessary, and it’s mostly so exhausting that you don’t always have the time to apply your mind to how you can contribute to your child’s development, but trust me, it’s all worth it.

My own two children are very young at the time I write this. I have developed multiple books, coloring books to be precise, that are simple yet effective in what they do.

What they do, is that they give the parents a creativity tool. Yes, labeling and coloring something might seem rather mundane of a task to develop something as vast and complicated as ‘imagination,’ but trust me, it works.

And the reason it does, is that it narrows everything down, or even, simplifies it to its meat and bones. Your child has two points of focus in my book. One is the labeling, where they simply trace the lines already present about the name of what’s on the page. The second is filling it in with colors.

A picture of a house, or a bird, waiting to get colored, sparks a child’s imagination. They want to color this one part blue, the other red. The want red doors, yellow-ed windows. They want the wings to be orange and the eyes to be blue. The ‘Why’ doesn’t matter. At this stage, imagination is not about the why, but the what.

If your child colors exactly how it’s supposed to, maybe they are great at all things factual. If they go away from the norm and color a bee, blue, for example, maybe they like to think differently. Maybe they just go all in on whichever color they want, showing their whim and imagination being powerfully in sync.

These differentiations can be great for parents to get an idea of how their child thinks, and thus, can lead to a better understanding in what their child needs to develop further.

I know I have felt much closer to my children ever since I began making these books. I almost subconsciously began to do activities with them that were more in line with how they thought. My youngest isn’t even old enough to color yet, but she loves watching her older brother do it, and I can tell that she’s getting some ideas on what to do from him.

Getting these coloring books made for them was like asking them the question “What do you see here?” and letting them go nuts with whatever answer they wanted. The answers, through your child’s hands, come alive in red roofs, blue wings, purple grass. Maybe the bird has orange wings and green eyes. Maybe the house has a rainbow chimney and windows like suns. Why? It doesn’t matter. At this stage, like I said already, imagination isn’t about the why, it’s about the what. It’s about freedom. It’s about exploration. It’s about instinct and expression.

I think children just need a direction, and something interesting. Their aptitude for learning is very, very high, and my two precious babies just love these books, and one of them can’t even use it yet!