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How to See Your Child’s Imagination as a Gift—Not an Annoyance
Designed to Create
I think it’s a universal truth that the lively sparks of the imagination that kids foster butt up against the iron-cold realities of a grown-up world and more often than not, get them in trouble. I experienced this myself in my own life. I can recall my parents sitting me down in late elementary school for a very stern conversation about the facts of life. And as they went on and on, leaning forward in earnest, my mind wandered at the wrong moment. And so when they asked me, “Okay, Katie, tell us what you think. We really want to know,” they were not enthused when I responded that I was wondering what it would be like to be a giant purple playground ball, bouncing from rooftop to rooftop down the street.
I think this experience goes beyond my own. I have been on mission trips where kids in Kenya have been batting a balloon back and forth between medical missionaries and then crouch away when the principal reprimands them. I’ve seen a preschooler, whose long brown curls fell out from chemotherapy long ago, take hold of her IV pole and use it as a scooter, sliding down the hospital corridor until a nurse stopped her with a sharp retort.
The truth is that too often when kids have these bursts of inspiration, imagery, and story that just seem to bubble out of them, we try to squelch it because it’s just not convenient, not appropriate, or not the right time. I think when we do this, though, we are stamping out what is really a gift from the Lord. And I would encourage kids to understand that when you have these moments where an image or an idea takes hold of you, you are reflecting who God made you to be. He’s a creator, and because we’re made in his image, he has designed us to create.
The Dream Keeper Saga Set
Kathryn Butler
Mixing fantasy with Christian themes, the Dream Keeper Saga takes middle-grade readers on an adventure steeped in magic, mystery, and glimmers of hope. This set includes all 5 books in the series by Kathryn Butler.
Steward the Imagination
Those bursts and images and stories that seem to come out of nowhere have kingdom significance when stewarded well. Don’t take my word for it. Consider those who’ve come before us who have written beautiful examples of literature—all of them informed by the gospel—that began as daydreams.
C. S. Lewis didn’t sit down with pen in hand and decide to create this world of Narnia and a very meticulously detailed apologetic to bring kids to the gospel. The Chronicles of Narnia began because he saw a fawn holding an umbrella, and the image stayed with him for years until he finally started to ask questions about the fawn. And in the setting of those questions, the great lion, Aslan, burst onto the scene, and Narnia was born.
It was the same for Tolkien, who first learned about Middle-earth not from being meticulous and constructing a world (although he did that eventually with his background in linguistics), but it initially began he was grading papers, got bored, and then the first line of The Hobbit bounced into his head out of nowhere: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” And he asked himself, What is a hobbit? And he started to ask questions and treat this kind of revelation as significant.
In my own much more humble example, the Dream Keeper Saga began because I was driving to work in the hospital, and suddenly an image of a girl walking into the kitchen and encountering a dragon popped into my head. And instead of dismissing it—as I normally would do because I had very serious work to do—I let it linger. And I said, Okay, maybe the Lord is giving me something here.
So my encouragement for kids would be that, yes, while we need to listen to grownups about when we need to attend to business and to our work and be respectful, don’t discount the value of your daydreams. Even if you have a flash of inspiration and you have to put it aside, come back to it, ask questions about it. You may just find that that seed of inspiration and delight gives life and bloom to a full story that helps to remind you and show others of the greatest storyteller of all.
Kathryn Butler is the author of The Dream Keeper Saga.
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