Jane Clifford on Your Kids & the Arts

By Jane Clifford at June 10, 2011 | 11:16 pm | Print

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I remember the smile on the face of my then-5-year-old son. Beaming from the stage at his Montessori school. Despite being the youngest member of the cast, it was clear he felt 10 feet tall.

Funny for a character named Sprout. I don’t remember the name of the play but I will never forget the moment.

We hear a lot about the importance of the arts in children’s lives.  I saw it that day.

My husband and I didn’t so much consciously expose our children to “the arts.” When they were young, art meant colored pencils and paper, sidewalk chalk and finger paint. Music appreciation featured guitar plunking and tambourine shaking and Raffi. Dance was doing the twist and other moves around the family room.

Little did we know that each of these activities was forging little connections in their brain and self-esteem in their hearts as we hung their pictures on the fridge, framed a few for the walls of our home and filled boxes now gathering dust in the garage.

Much credit goes to my husband. I may fancy myself a writer but he was creative.  I marveled at the things he would come up with.  When we decided to regularly measure the kids’ heights, he made faint pencil marks on a sliver of wall next to the kitchen cabinets.  As our four children grew taller, and their friends were added to the wall, I mumbled about all the marks. So Randy drew small flowers around each one and made colored-pencil petals for each. Over the years, he produced a nearly floor-to-ceiling flower garden of living history. His free spirit delighted the kids. .

A bass player in a band all through high school, he introduced all four of them to rock, the blues and jazz. I contributed Sinatra and Afro-Cuban and ballads. Yes, even Barry Manilow. Randy played the guitar at classroom events and organized sing-alongs at home.

Creativity was second nature to him. And it came to haunt me one night at our youngest daughter’s bedtime. The story man wasn’t home so the task fell to me. I tucked the 4-year-old in and got a book from her collection, sat down on the bed and started reading.

“MOM!” she said, startling me. I thought she had figured out I was skipping over some of the text to get the job done. Never a good idea because, while we may be tired on the 50^th reading of the same title, they know every word, including the ones you’re leaving out.

That wasn’t the problem.

“I want you to tell me a story from your mind,” she said.

Uh-oh.

These father-daughter times allowed him to pull things from his very vivid imagination and I, apparently, was expected to do the same. She endured a journalist’s feeble attempt at fiction but was glad to have dad take back bedtime. Within a couple of years, she was sitting at the kitchen table creating her own stories. I helped with grammar.

Growing up with these four children allowed me to do things I never did at their age. I learned to be comfortable at the symphony, sat through many a musical, read young adult novels aloud to them that I had missed along the way. The Nutcracker entertained my older girls but helped me appreciate ballet.

Randy and I paved the way to grown-up museums by having our son’s birthday at the Children’s Museum when it was still a small but vibrant space at La Jolla Village Square. We said yes to art and music lessons as often as we could afford and watched San Diego Junior Theatre bring out self-confidence, among other skills.

We didn’t know all this would happen. We weren’t enlightened parents following some elaborate extra-curricular plan. We were just following our children’s lead.

Along the way, these activities did their magic, helping young humans develop responsibility, problem-solving, teamwork and, above all, the kind of free-thinking that this over-scheduled generation will need to succeed and, more importantly, enjoy life.

There is a mountain of research to show the value of the arts as part of a child’s complete education. In our hearts, we know it to be true. We also know we can’t count on school to provide it.  What we can do is make the most of our children’s natural curiosity.

The only drawback? To this day, mine love dragging out their dad’s karaoke machine.  And they skip over all the Manilow songs.

Share the ways you encourage creativity and bring the arts into your children’s lives. Join our conversation.

And here are 10 ways to get more art into their lives, courtesy of Americans for the Arts.

 

Can We Talk?, Parent to Parent art making, creativity