How Can We Help Children Be Creators, Not Just Watchers?

Wednesday, 30 July 2025, 4:17 pm
Press Release: Kindercare

Helping our children be creators, not just watchers, starts with giving them time, space, and simple tools to explore the world in their own way. When we prioritise hands-on play, imagination, and everyday problem-solving over passive activities like screen time or shopping, we support their natural curiosity and growing independence. It’s not about removing all media, but about making sure our tamariki have plenty of chances to do, make, and discover for themselves.

Children as creators, not consumers

Our children were born to be hands-on, explore, and create. To make sense of the world through their own activity, curiosity, trials, errors, and imagination. While there may be times they watch something, and give their brain a rest from intense activity, we want this to just be a slice or ‘sliver’ of their time each day or week, not the largest portion of the way they spend their time. Consuming isn’t ‘all bad’, but when we compare it to the alternative – the child as a creator – we can see which is going to be more beneficial for our children’s developing brains (and selves as lifelong, capable learners). We need to encourage our young children to be creators, not consumers, still sponge-like, but paired with decision making, physical manipulation of materials, and movement.

While it is true that we can describe the very young child’s brain as being “absorbent”, and soaking up their environment like a sponge, what we’re really doing here is celebrating the child’s amazing capacity to learn and develop through their play, and not passively soaking up and simply consuming the ideas, content or creations or others.

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There are ‘ingredients’ that support our children to be active creators rather than passive consumers. One is open-ended play materials, including loose parts, large and small. To be able to tinker and explore, build, design, plot and plan brings the ‘sparks’ of curiosity and creativity alive, and put the child and their ideas at the centre of their experience.

Coupled with this, of course, is time. That feels obvious, but if we are rushing all the time, or only giving short bursts for play between scheduled events, our tamariki learn to only concentrate and engage for very short windows of time. They know their creations have to be quick, so they don’t spread their play-wings fully.

Why Time and Nature Are Essential to Creativity

Nature is another ‘must-have’. Not (only) because it takes children away from screentime, but because ‘green’ time is possibility-filled. The opportunities for imagining, exploring, and playing are immense. It’s no coincidence that the innate play urges that all young children possess, and need to express, are all active. They’re about doing, not passivity, and the child shaping the experience, not having it all served up to them. Sitting is not a play urge!

It’s useful to realise that there is a difference between mindlessly consuming, and doing so more consciously. Even young children can learn to question what they watch, and that just because a show or presenter said something, it doesn’t make it true. It helps if we know what our children are watching or playing, and engage in it with them, or ‘check in’ once they’re done. Check their understanding. Point out messages that don’t fit our values of inclusivity or kindness. Encourage imagination in the same way we do with stories where we might suggest our child offers up a changed ending or new plot possibilities. Check-ins like this can remind our tamariki that ‘checking-out’ while watching things isn’t their only (or the best) option.

In our technological world, ‘consuming’ makes us think of screens and content, but it is also fair to say we live in a consumer-society in terms of materialism too. Our children can quite easily be swept up with ‘buying’ and ‘having’ (advertising is so rife in their world), and so we can consciously model otherwise. We can keep our wallets away, and choose resourcefulness instead, and encourage our children to do the same.

Resourcefulness Over Materialism: A Family Approach

Yes, resourcefulness can be about being thrifty and saving money, but it can also be about problem-solving, and satisfaction in our inventiveness and coping skills. If we present this second attitude as to why we might repurpose things, make do with what we have, or patiently save for purchases that are worth buying, then that’s a positive ‘challenge’ for our children. It doesn’t feel like hardship in the same way as, “we can’t afford it” might to a young child. Of course, that can be true, and is fair to share with them at times, but a ‘spin’ on things can sometimes help our children get onboard with our approach willingly rather than begrudgingly. Our reasons for wanting our children to avoid a consumerism mindset also aren’t just about money. What we want to avoid is them developing the idea that happiness comes from what we own. That acquiring more is the secret to satisfaction.

More than what we say to our young tamariki, they learn from what we do. Or rather, from how we are. If we are wanting our children to consume less and create more, then that’s what we need to model. To share with them. To make it a ‘family affair’. And while cutting back on our own social media scrolling or mindless show-binging habits might initially feel like missing out on something, we will soon realise that we aren’t. We are opening opportunities instead, and regaining some of the ideas-generating, problem-solving ingenuity we let slip when we tilted our own consuming versus creating scale too far in the wrong direction.

Our children don’t need to be shielded entirely from consumption, but they do need to be anchored in creation. When we provide time, tools, and trust, we empower tamariki to lead with imagination, resourcefulness, and critical thinking. The balance tips when we model creative lives ourselves, making the shift from consumption to creation a shared family journey, one that builds not only capable learners but confident, thoughtful humans.

This article first appeared at: https://www.kindercare.co.nz/blog/how-can-we-help-children-be-creators-not-just-watchers/

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