Can creativity actually be trained?
Most parents assume it's innate. Research says otherwise, which means most of us are getting it wrong.
I have three kids. One of my daughters sees herself as creative. It’s core to who she is. She’ll spend an hour building something nobody asked for, tear it apart, and start again without blinking. My other daughter shows just as much raw ability. She writes long stories, does elaborate performances. But creativity isn’t as much part of her self-story. Not yet.
The gap between them isn’t talent. It’s identity.
I didn’t fully understand that distinction until I spent a year researching creativity for a guide I was writing. What I found changed how I engage with my kids at home.
You can’t teach a child to be creative. You can only stop training it out of them.
A generation already getting less creative
A longitudinal analysis of nearly 300,000 Torrance Test scores found that creativity has been declining among American children since 1990, with the steepest drops in the youngest kids. This was the trajectory before AI arrived.
Children have become “less imaginative, less humorous, less unconventional, and less likely to see things from a different angle.”
Now we’re giving this generation a tool that makes creative effort optional.
When a ten-year-old faces a blank page and types “give me 20 story ideas” into Claude, they skip the generative process entirely. They get the output without the exercise. And a 2025 meta-analysis of 28 studies found exactly what you’d fear: humans collaborating with AI produced a large negative effect on idea diversity (g = -0.86). More ideas that met quality thresholds, but those ideas converged toward similar patterns. Competent homogeneity instead of distinctive originality.
Worse: creative improvements gained while using AI disappear once the tool is removed. People revert to baseline. The AI boosted performance without building capacity. It was scaffolding that collapsed when removed.
A generation whose creativity was already declining, now handed a tool that substitutes for creative effort while creating the illusion of creative output.
The same body of research that documents the decline also shows the way out.
Creativity can be trained, but not like you’d expect
169 studies compared kids who received creativity training to kids who didn’t. The result: trained kids consistently outperformed untrained kids on creative tasks, with a moderate effect size (d = 0.53). Even adjusted for publication bias, the effect holds (d = 0.29-0.32). This isn’t marginal. Creativity responds to practice in a way that most parents and most schools haven’t internalized.
What does effective training actually look like? Not what you’d expect. The interventions with the strongest evidence aren’t creativity classes or brainstorming worksheets. They’re environmental:
Open-ended play. Give a kid materials with no “right” answer (blocks, loose parts, blank paper) and they have to generate their own outcome. A meta-analysis of play and creativity in preschoolers found a large positive effect (g = 1.63). Nothing else comes close for young kids. For older children, the equivalent is any medium without instructions: a pile of LEGO bricks with no set, a blank sketchbook, an empty Scratch project.
Autonomy. A meta-analysis of 30 studies with over 20,000 participants found parental autonomy support correlates with children’s creativity, while psychological control correlates negatively. A three-year-old benefits from you sitting beside them. A ten-year-old benefits from you leaving the room. Your instinct to help, guide, and improve their work undermines the thing you’re trying to build.
Volume over polish. In the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, administered from kindergarten onward, fluency and originality correlate above r = .90. Children who generate more ideas reliably generate more original ideas. For a five-year-old, that means ten drawings instead of one “good” one. For a twelve-year-old, three rough drafts instead of one polished essay. Originality hides inside volume.
Constraints, not total freedom. Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet: could he write a book using only 50 words? An experiment named after that bet found that people given constrained creative tasks produced more creative output than those given total freedom. Young children don’t need this. They don’t feel the weight of infinite possibility yet. But from around age 8, when self-criticism and blank-page anxiety set in, constraints start to matter. “Write a story in exactly 50 words” is a harder prompt than “write a story.” That’s the point.
Stop rewarding creative output. Teresa Amabile’s research showed that when children expect external rewards for creative work, they produce less creative outputs. 128 studies confirmed it. The effect was stronger in children than in college students. The star chart, the “that’s beautiful!”, the fridge display. They turn creative play into a performance for an audience. Notice the effort, not the product.
None of this requires a subscription or a program. It requires parents to resist the instinct to structure, correct, reward, and optimize. If you’re the kind of parent reading this, that’s probably your default setting.
The strongest predictor isn’t what you’d guess
Underneath all five of those interventions, there’s something more important.
A child’s belief that they are creative is one of the strongest predictors of whether they actually act creatively.
Not their training. Not their environment. Their self-story.
This creates a feedback loop: kids who see themselves as creative seek out creative challenges, which builds ability, which reinforces the identity. The inverse is equally powerful. School rewards right answers, social pressure to conform kicks in, and the “I’m creative” story gets overwritten.
That’s the gap I see between my two daughters. Same household, same materials, same opportunities. One of them has the story. The other doesn’t—yet. And the research says that story is the lever.
You might be missing half the creativity at home
It took me a while to see this: I was looking for creativity in a narrow band. Drawing. Building. Making things with their hands. The stuff that looks creative.
But then I started paying attention differently. One of my girls will go heads down on creative projects for hours at a time: drawing, sewing, fashion design. I labeled that as obviously creative pursuits. Another one puts on elaborate live performances — fully staged, complete with intermissions and seating assignments for an audience of stuffies and reluctant adults. These are creative acts. Profoundly creative acts. They just don’t produce an artifact you can photograph and put on the fridge.
The research backs this up. Creativity isn’t one thing. It’s generating possibilities, connecting ideas that don’t obviously belong together, risking something that might not work, and refining a rough idea into something real. A kid staging a live show is doing all four at once. A kid building a fictional world is practising ideation and connection at a level that a coloring book never touches.
The implication for parents: if you’re only counting the drawings and the LEGO builds, you’re missing most of the creative work your kid is already doing. And if you’re not naming it (”that performance you just put on was incredibly creative”), you’re missing a chance to reinforce the identity story that the research says matters most.
The blank page is the point, and AI might take it away
AI doesn’t threaten creativity wholesale. It threatens specific parts of the creative process, and those parts matter most for kids who are still developing.
It eliminates productive discomfort. When a child faces a blank page, they’re experiencing the uncertainty of “I don’t know if this will work.” That’s exactly where creative courage develops. Every time a kid asks “what should I write about?” instead of sitting with the uncertainty, they miss the exercise that builds creative risk tolerance.
It homogenizes the ideas that do emerge. AI outputs converge on patterns in its training data. Kids who learn to create through AI may develop a narrower range of connections than those who struggle through their own ideation.
It decouples effort from outcome. When children generate their own ideas and see them work, the brain reinforces the action-outcome connection: my thinking produced this. When AI generates the ideas, that loop doesn’t fire the same way. The child experiences the output without the neurological signature of having created it.
And yet AI also expands what’s possible. A child with AI tools can prototype ideas, visualize concepts, and create at levels that were previously impossible. The question isn’t whether AI is good or bad for creativity. It’s whether children develop strong creative foundations before AI becomes a constant presence.
The research is clear on this: build the muscle first, then hand them the power tools.
After a year in the research, four things stood out. Not because they’re complicated, but because most parents, myself included, aren’t doing them consistently.
Try this week
Research is useful when it changes what you do.
Label the behavior, not the kid. The next time your child finishes anything creative (a drawing, a tower, a made-up game, a theatrical performance), name what they did: “You made that up yourself. Nobody told you to do that. That’s really creative.” The identity story builds from specific evidence, not generic praise.
Protect 30 minutes of unstructured boredom. No screens, no activities, no suggestions. Boredom prompts self-directed activity. The brain, deprived of external input, starts generating its own. What emerges from that window is often more creative than anything you could have provided.
Try the no-AI-first rule. (If they use AI at home) Before your child asks Claude for ideas, have them generate their own. Write the first draft before seeing what the machine produces. The productive discomfort of not knowing is the exercise. AI becomes an amplifier for existing capacity, not a substitute for developing it.
Look wider. Creativity isn’t just art and building. It’s the elaborate game with rules your kid invented. It’s the performance for an audience of one. It’s the fictional world that only exists in their head. When you see it, name it. That’s how the story gets written.
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Excellent article - well thought and written