Why children’s ‘mistakes’ are crucial to creativity - and how to turn them into successes
“Why does everything always go wroooooong?” said almost every single child, ever, when faced with instructions how to make a ……… (fill in your own blank).
What is a mistake?
We all want to succeed. We want to achieve. We want to get things ‘right’. But life isn’t always as friendly as that. In fact, most of the time we have to go through a fair few ‘wrongs’ before we get to the ‘right’. Haircuts, turns, misters…
It isn’t always easy to tell a child this though. “It’s important that you fell out of that tree, it’ll help you remember to concentrate when you’re doing dangerous stuff.” Sounds a bit cold hearted. When it comes to art, there is hardly a child I know that hasn’t gone too far with their colour mixing and it’s turned brown. Always the brown. Or they’ve had trouble controlling the scissors and accidentally cut the head/leg/nose off their newest creation.
This is where I want to turn back the clock, give that first child a big sheet of paper and ask for as many different colour splotches as possible. They’ll eventually get to the brown of course, but we were mixing colours anyway. Will they decide on names for the colours on the way? Remember what went in to make Grandma’s Cheek Pink or Veggie Sausage Brown? (Check out one of our colour exploration blog posts HERE, so much fun).
In this turned-back-time world I will ask the other child to cut strips, squiggles and squares to make a big pile of cut outs we can scrumple or stick down. Perhaps they’ll invent new shapes, creating weird landscapes or brand new creatures on the way. Of course the shapes themselves aren’t important - well they are, but in a different way - it’s the process, the journey, the practice that we get in whilst we’re playing. There is no ‘wrong’ way here.
Remember to play
“Playing isn't just fun, it's also the best way for young children to learn. By playing, children can practise all the skills they'll need as they grow up.” NHS UK
Brilliantly, this quote comes from the UK’s own NHS website. Its now so widely accepted that play is important, it’s made it into government guidelines. So that’s it then. Sorted.
Except how to do this? With a toddler we expect to play, we can clearly see that they’re learning all the time and we let them experiment, explore and play. But an eight year old? Or a 12 year old? These children are in school, they should be learning now, shouldn’t they? Well why not learning through play?
If we remove the end goal, the box to tick, realise that learning isn’t necessarily linear, we might have a chance of spotting a different ‘success’ that we didn’t even know we were aiming for. I reckon we could all do with a bit more play in our lives, and that’s where this type of art and creative experimentation comes in. An hour of fiddling. Cutting and sticking just because the colours speak to us. Some time twisting wire or putting faces on inanimate objects. Playing.
This is why I’ve put mistakes in inverted commas up there. Because if we can turn the whole idea of a mistake on its head, we can give our children (and ourselves) the chance to see these moments as a change of direction, a new way of thinking about something, an opportunity we might not have otherwise had.
Mauve - a lesson in ‘mistakes
1856. Eighteen-year-old chemistry student William Perkin's experiment had gone horribly wrong. But the deep brown sludge his botched project produced had an unexpected power: the power to dye everything it touched a brilliant purple. He quickly ditched his expectation to find a substitute for quinine (as a treatment for malaria, critical for the British Empire).
Perkin had discovered mauve. This became the world's first synthetic, colourfast dye, bridging a gap between chemistry and industry. Perkin saw his ‘mistake’ was revolutionary and he changed his direction - he left the world of pure chemistry and set a small commercial textile dying plant, just when textiles were Britains booming industry. Mauve took over the fashion world and Perkin was a made man.
William Perkin was prepared to change his mind. He might well have felt bad about his lack of malarial squashing skills, but he didn’t let that bad feeling stop him spotting how the ‘fail’ could become a ‘success’. Like so many of the creative folk around us during the Covid pandemic that is the story of 2020, he pivoted.
How to change the ‘mistake’ mindset
If you’re not aiming for a particular outcome, you won’t be able to fail. I’m not saying keep driving around willy-nilly without knowing where you’re going and you’re sure to end up at a supermarket (although this is probably true). Or that the contractors working on your house don’t need plans to work from, that this’ll stop them getting it wrong - there’s a fair chance of error even with plans in my experience.
This is art, remember. And creative, exploratory, process-based art at that. We’re aiming to take the expectation out of the situation, and free the children up to fiddle, explore and invent with impunity. It’s where they develop their creativity. Their ability to think on the spot, to be open to new ideas. To play.
So let’s try not to ask “What is it?” Let’s aim for “Tell me about this” instead. Perhaps if we begin by spreading materials out and asking “What might this do?” or “How could you join these?” we could allow room for development, creativity, play. We might show that we’re not looking for a perfectly finished rose gold zebra made of toilet rolls eating a sandwich. More a 3D story about how the first animal in Zebzeb Land decided to plant a sandwich tree….
In this scenario there are so many successes. Making a toilet roll stand up (use tabs, watch this video), painting stripes, making your own lunch, telling a story etc etc. Children can be successful, and more importantly feel successful, if they are achieving things that they didn’t even know were goals. HERE is a blog post I wrote about the words we use when we talk to our children about their art (*Spoiler alert* - don’t try and guess what their art is…)
Perhaps a ‘mistake’ is just a problem that needs solving. Creative thinking is after all a synonym for problem solving. Given time and practise, plus the freedom to try stuff out, I think we could develop the skills to successfully figure out the answer. Or at least an answer. There’s very rarely just just one…
