When I was starting out on my parenting journey, it was always a goal to raise children who enjoyed being creative. I invested a lot of our resources into encouraging their creative talents, but there were two separate moments during their childhoods that really influenced how our family operates and allows creativity to flourish.

#1: Art supplies are meant to be consumed, not conserved.

The toddler years are rough, man.  You’re dealing with developing minds and motor skills, and it takes a lot of patience.  If you’re adding in creative endeavors, it takes a lot of “wasted” resources when you think of those little minds trying to figure out how things work, and those little hands trying to learn how to operate scissors and paintbrushes and glitter containers.  I cannot remember where I heard the phrase, “Art supplies are meant to be consumed, not conserved,” but it stopped me in my tracks.

As luck would have it, we had a “Fun Friday” the next day as part of our homeschool schedule, and I’d scheduled some sort of cookie making and decorating for one of the activities that day.  One of the girls was obsessed with the sprinkles that day, and I would have normally discouraged her exploration and experimentation with the vast amounts of sprinkles it felt like she was “wasting,” but that phrase popped into my head, and it made me hesitate to intervene.  She wasn’t trying to waste sprinkles; she was trying to figure out how many sprinkles you could put on a cookie without them all sliding off when you moved the cookie.  I taught her how to tilt the sprinkle-laden cookies to empty the extra sprinkles onto a paper towel, and how to then turn the paper towel into a funnel and return the extra sprinkles to the jar.  All three of the girls were then obsessed with this party trick and spent the rest of cookie decorating time practicing the skill with varying degrees of success.  They were enjoying the activity!  I sat on my hands and let them.  It was challenging for me!

We had another cookie decorating activity a few weeks later, and the urge to over sprinkle was gone.  They did the sprinkle funneling on their own (with varying success yet again…I think they were 2, 4, and 6 years old) and worked on different, more artistic-leaning skills. The urge to glut cookies with sprinkles had been satisfied. They knew what would happen if they did that. They learned how to clean up a mess/mistake. By letting them spend time doing those things, they were able to move onto more advanced concepts. So much of being little is experimenting with the world around you. If it’s safe and not purposely wasteful, then it’s OK to let them use the art supplies. I never would have let them throw sprinkles in the air or dump them down the drain because that’s just being wasteful. But figuring out how many sprinkles were too many on a cookie? That was an important learning activity. And I never would have realized the importance of it without hearing the phrase, “Art supplies are meant to be consumed, not conserved.”

#2: Your home is a workshop, not a temple.

There’s a quote that goes around in Mormon/LDS culture, from the Bible Dictionary, which says “[o]nly the home can compare with the temple in sacredness.”  Families interpret this in a myriad of ways, but a popular one to default to is to try and replicate the tidiness of the temple in one’s home. I think some of the welcoming aspects of visiting the temple is the fact that they’re so clean, they’re decorated nicely, and they’re quiet—three things that I could not usually say were true about my home during the Young Children Years. But then I heard the phrase, “Your home is a workshop, not a temple,” and I really liked it. Yes, we strive for sacredness in our homes, but sacred isn’t synonymous with tidy and tastefully decorated. Sacred, to me, encompasses nurturing, growth, patience, love, and beauty. These attributes don’t require sterility and silence in order to happen. Part of the beauty of nurturing children is that it’s not silent at all. It’s joyous and exuberant and punctuated with laughter. Most of the behaviors that go along with properly nurturing children would NOT be allowed in the temple. Homes and temples have the same goals, but they are vastly different kinds of workspaces.

Workshops still need tidiness to be functional, but it’s a different kind of tidiness than that of a temple. Workshops need manageable levels of noise, and they also need safety and rules. They’re different types of noise, safety, and rules than you’d have in a temple. I adjusted my expectations to line up with this new mindset.

Another important aspect of workshop spaces is that you need your own workspace that you can come back to as you have time, without worry that someone else is going to come along and disturb your project and supplies. I have my craft room and I expect my projects to be undisturbed until I return to them. Michael has the garage and it’s important we don’t mess with his stuff out there. I decided that it was important for each of our children to have their own creative spaces as well that would be respected and left alone. Whether it’s a folding table in their bedrooms, a portion of the dining room table for a larger project, a storage bin with their materials, or marking off time for them to have unrestricted access to the kitchen for hours-long baking sessions, I’ve tried to make sure our home functioned as an orderly workshop that allowed each of them the time, materials, and space to create.  So much of being creative rests upon having enough undisturbed time to create and the space to create in.

And if you’re trying to raise four creative kids and allow both yourself and your spouse to pursue creative interests as well—your home is not going to be temple-tidy all the time, and there is no embarrassment in that! If someone stops by and there’s a huge mess on the front room floor from the kids planning their next Dungeons & Dragons campaign, I refuse, on principle, to apologize for that mess’s existence. That mess is beautiful—it symbolizes hours of my children working together, because they want to, on an activity for our entire family to enjoy. That’s amazing.

Every Saturday since the start of the COVID shutdowns our kitchen has been roped off for Renaissance’s particular use until 3:00pm. She destroys that room; it’s covered in buttery fingerprints, a fine dusting of powdered sugar, and little flecks of batter everywhere as she’s experimented with making cakes, cookies, and pastries—and she is darn good at it now.

If you walk into our kitchen on a Saturday around 1:00pm, I’m not apologizing for that mess. If you walk into our kitchen on a Tuesday and it still bears the marks of Ren’s weekend baking adventures, I will be embarrassed because by that point it’s no longer a workshop mess, it’s just a mess. There’s a difference between the two. If the Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia is still on the floor the next day and/or we haven’t played a game of it in a week, then it’s just a mess. Active creativity usually requires active messiness. If there’s no active creativity, there should no longer be a mess.

Creativity is not an excuse for filth.  There shouldn’t be messiness just because you can be messy. Just like we don’t waste art supplies, we don’t leave messes on purpose. Clean up when you’re done! Messiness while creating can’t be avoided, but you can tidy up in between your creative sessions so things look as tidy as they can given the circumstances.

Renaissance is expected to clean up her baking adventures in the kitchen so we can continue to use the kitchen throughout the week. D&D dice can’t be left on the front room carpet to trip people and clog up the vacuum. Rachel must empty her paint water when she’s not painting so we don’t run the risk of it tipping and getting all over her worktable and/or the carpet. Michael vacuums up the sawdust when he’s done working in the garage for the day so it doesn’t get tracked into the house. I tidy up the craft room so bits of string and fabric trimmings don’t migrate down the hall. A tidied workspace is a welcoming workspace for the next time you’re able to work in that space. I’ve avoided working on creative projects because my workspace has been cluttered, which is especially sad because it’s so preventable.

Creative Time, at any age, is a wise investment—it builds skills, it promotes wellbeing, and it just makes life more enjoyable—but it takes the investment of resources (materials, time, and energy) to really make it beneficial. We need to relax a bit about being overly efficient with those resources and allow our children to grow at their own pace and bloom in their own way on their creative journeys. The creative paths I’ve invested in over the years have led to much different results than I ever imagined.

My kids are not pursuing all the creative paths I thought they would, but they are pursuing creativity that their hearts love. I know they wouldn’t have discovered those creative paths without some trial and error. They’ve used a ton of art supplies that ended in abandoned paths, but those little journeys were necessary, if only for them to learn they didn’t want to pursue those paths. None of those resources were wasted because they switched to a different interest.

There’s no failure there. We consumed art supplies and it led to a different interest. That’s success! There’s no embarrassment (on my part) for the times people judged active messes in my home. That’s those people’s crosses to bear. I am proud of those messes; proud that I gave my children the space and time to experiment, learn, and flourish. It’s one of the parenting decisions I’m most proud of. Their childhoods have been full of color, textures, discovery, smells, lessons learned from safe mistakes, and the satisfaction of completing a project on their own. I am immensely proud of all of that.

Consume the paint, the sprinkles, and the fabric.

Make space and time for undisturbed creativity.

Allow the messes to happen.

Cheerfully help them to clean up.

These steps allow children to feel comfortable with being creative and teaches them how to be responsible adults, which is one of the biggest goals of raising humans. The entire creative process is a beautiful metaphor of what it means to live a fulfilled life.

I’m so glad for the shared creativity I’ve experienced with my children. It’s been one of my favorite parts of motherhood.