How Adults Can Encourage Kids To Be Original Thinkers

Grant writes about the importance of getting kids to take risks, to embrace their own curiosity and to be confident in where their minds wander. So how can adults create spaces and cultures of originality to breed these new ideas?

When I first read Originals I couldn’t help but take notes. What I jotted down was essentially a to-do list for how I could be more creative, how I could think up and then communicate new ideas.

But the book — written by Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania — is not just a guide for adults.

Its pages are littered with interesting advice on how teachers and parents can encourage and cultivate their kids to be original, too.

Grant writes about the importance of getting kids to take risks, to embrace their own curiosity and to be confident in where their minds wander. So how can adults create spaces and cultures of originality to breed these new ideas?

In the book you talk about how taking risks can lead to original ideas. So how can parents facilitate risk-taking with their kids?

Well, I think one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of parents make is they spend all their time enforcing rules, and I’m guilty of this. Every time one of my daughters misbehaves, I’m like, “New rule!” And then I don’t end up doing a whole lot with it.

But the sad thing about rules is that they don’t teach kids to think for themselves. And kids try to figure out how they can either avoid taking risks altogether, or to take risks that they can get away with. As opposed to learning to take sensible risks that will allow them to try new things.