Obedience > Creativity

On the penultimate day of my son's summer camp, parents are invited to take part in "family night". Part of the evening involves each age group performing a song for the families in attendance.

I was following around my two year old daughter, who cannot sit still, as she explored the camp. As we walked away from the picnic area where the performances were going on, we found an octagonal shaped platform, about 10 feet across, surrounded by an octagonal shaped fence, about three feet high.

Suddenly, a group of kids who had finished their performance rushed over, hopped the octagonal fence, and began playing a game they had clearly been taught over the course of the week. Although the game was supposed to involve a ball, having no ball, they improvised and used one kid's shoe.

Meanwhile, another group of kids was giving their performance as the families continued to watch. As the group of kids playing the game became louder and more intense, a camp director eventually came over, made them stop, and told them to return to the picnic area.

I keep thinking about this story for several reasons. It reminds me of the research into "nurturing" versus "strict" parenting styles. Apparently, whichever one chooses is a very strong predictor of how they vote.

One of the questions the researchers would ask is if you think it's more important for a child to be creative or obedient. Creative respondents tended to be liberal voters and were given the "nurturing" label; obedient respondents tended to be conservative voters and were given the "strict parent" label.

In the story I told, almost any adult would agree with the camp director's decision to end the game and make the kids return to the picnic area (in case I wasn't clear, they were never given permission to play and were supposed to be seated the entire time). The pro arguments are that it is distracting to the families trying to listen to the other students' songs and unfair to the kids who had practiced their routine and sat through the earlier performances.

However, my guess is that, given the chance, almost all campers would have preferred to play than to give their performance. So who is the performance really for: the campers or their families?

In siding the camp director, we choose obedience over creativity. When asked, progressive parents will say they prefer a creative child to an obedient one. But in practice, I think they are more likely to do the latter and scold the group of campers, who had created their own game, for not sitting quietly at their picnic table.

Peter Gray writes frequently about the need for unstructured, unsupervised play. But as a society, we continue to move further away from that ideal, even the parents who might think of themselves as "nurturing."