• Question: Why are adults and teenagers less imaginative than children?

    Asked by samandaashishlgs to Simone, Carys on 14 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by benandizaak, willandsasha35646, benandajay10.
    • Photo: Simone Bijvoet

      Simone Bijvoet answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      You tell me! 🙂

      This is a question that is really puzzling me as well. Why do we at a certain time stop playing and pretending. I think part of the answer is that when you get older you are expected to follow certain social rules. I remember when I left primary school to go to secondary school, it was all of the sudden not done anymore to play on the street and pretending to play house and stuff. Who told me that? No one really, but I felt that I was too old for that now and that I should do other things like talking to my friends about boys.. 😉

      I really believe that it’s important to incourage teenagers to keep pretending or, as you could call it then as well, acting. We can do that by giving drama classes at school or encourage other ways of pretending (for example role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons).

      My research is about finding a relationship between pretending and creativity in young children. My idea is that if we find that pretending can make children more creative, this could be the same for teenagers and adults. Because creativity is a thing that adults do accept within their social rules and we in general admire people who are really creative, this might help getting the older people back into using their imagination.

      I hope this answers your question a bit. Do you have any other ideas why teenagers are less imaginative?
      Simone

    • Photo: Carys Cook

      Carys Cook answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      One theory is that young children have more of a learning capacity in their brains, and are constantly growing new brain cells. They don’t need to worry about looking after themselves as much as adults so have more brain time to think about other things. Although, I know lots of adults who are as imaginative as children, and act like them too! 😉

Comments

  • Photo: Jeremy

    Jeremy commented on :

    What I like about your question is that it makes one wonder about what imagination is. I think that imagination is what we use to guess about things we don’t know about. That is extremely important in life and evolution: you can see that imagining that a predator might be around the next tree is a useful skill! Imagining what another person is feeling is also useful socially. Our ability to do this well It is possibly one of the things that makes human beings human. Children, teenagers and adults all have the ability to imagine, but perhaps because children are more ignorant, they have more things to apply their imagination to. Also, they have more play time in which to do so.

    (Of course, as a scientist I should also question how you know that “adults and teenagers are less imaginative than children”. Perhaps this is just a myth or false perception. How would you test it?)

  • Photo: Simone

    Simone commented on :

    Jeremy makes a good point and raises two important questions that we always have to ask in science: how do we define words and how can we measure it?

    I think imagination can have different definitions. For example, you could define it as the ability to think beyond what is real. Another way, one that I use in my study into creativity, is to define it as the ability to think of as many different things to use one object. Now this is a different type of imagination, because thinking that you could use an egg holder as a hat is the called imaginative, while based on the first definition (think beyond what is real) it wouldn’t be. A hat is after all a real thing.

    This shows how the definition of imagination is really important to know how to answer the question. And I can tell you, in psychology there’s always a lot of debate about how to define words.