3. Home Environment and Creativity
3.1 Environment and Creativity
In creativity, as in other aspects of human development, the heredity-environment issue is not yet amenable to conclusive investigations due to contradictory results.Psychologists hold the notion that heredity tends to impose upper limits on intellectual functioning by bequeathing to the infant a set of potentials, while environment is more concerned with regulating the extent to which these potentials are realised and the particular direction in which they develop. Environmental studies which have been conducted on creativity, instead revolve around problems such as the influence of age, sex, family background., parent-child intraction parent-child relations, parental-encouragement and child rearing practices as the home environment domains and teacher effectiveness, teacher behaviour , institutional climate, teacher values, attitudes, competence and role etc., as the school environment variables.
Although none of the results is unequivocal, some generalizations may be ventured with due consideration to some inevitable exeptions. It is noteworthy to mention here that creativity neither operates nor blossoms in vaccum. The creative mind apart from his personality make up interacts vigorously with a nexus of supportive and stimulating factors in the environment, whether at home or at school to be worth its name (Weisberg and Springler, 1961). In fact Miel (1962) defined creativity in terms of its relationship with environment. A review of the research on creativity reveals that while mental health and other personality factors are related to creativity, a general paucity of systematic, positive and co-ordinated effort of various environmental factors are also conducive to the development of creativity (Gupta 1974). In influenced our present social setup, a child is by his home environment or by his either school environment or both.
Creative thinking process has been considered as a bipolar phenomenon in which there is an interaction between a person and the environment in which he exists (Chambers, 1973). Parloff (1972) assumes that creative performance is a function of a complex interaction among such factors as personality structure, environmental influences and cognitive capacities.
Piaget (1962) thinks "every act of thinking implies a balance between one's assimilation of the outside world to one's needs and accombdations of oneself to demands of the outside world. When the balance is broken in favour of accombdation the child imitates reality, and when the balance is broken in favour of assimilation, the child enters the realm of symbolic play - the realm of creative imagination. "Imagination-play," writes Piaget "is a symbolic transposition which subjects things to the child's activity without rules or limitatio ns."Thurstone (1962) was convinced that creativity can be encouraged Schachtel or discouraged by environmental conditions. (1959) and Kubie (1965) indicate that creative behaviour can be developed by the environment being controlled appropriately.
3.2 Home Environment and Creativity
Among the banal factors in the home environment apart from sex, age, and locality, birth order, family size, sibling relations family background plays a vital role in the development of creativity. Socio-economic status of parents is also known to influence the creativity of children. It has by now become more or less a truism that parents influence their children's behaviour. In general, there is a cumulative effect of parental encouragement on achievement and creativity. In this regard Schuchtel (1959) puts it as, "the more worried the parents are about the dangers of the world, the more likely are they to impart this view to the child".
3.3 Role of Parents in Fostering Creativity
The role of family and the home environmental influences cannot be undoubtedly under-estimated in the process of child's development of creativity. A good parent-child relation is an affectional relationship, such a relationship is indicated by the degree to which the child shows a feeling of trust and security in his parents by sharing confidence with them and by going to them for advice and help on perplexing problems. The degree to which the child has an opportunity for self-expression and for the recognition of his work and play activities depends upon the kind of parent- child relationship, the child rearing practices, reward punishment in the family, over protection, rejection and the motivation of need for achievement in the members of the family etc., also play a very important role in the development of creativity. Respect for autonomy in the family, non-conformity, respect for individuality and ability, parental tolerance and self-control are other factors in the home environment which influence the growth of creativity in children.
The interplay of environmental factors in home conditions can best be understood in the light of the theoretical framework proposed by Harwey and Schroder (1961). They suggested that ''as individual concepts are ordered according to certain patterns of organization, the degree of conceptualization or abstraction varies from person to person. A person at high level is more likely to explore situation and to be creative and adaptable when faced with changing environment in contrast to a person at a low level, who manifests thinking which is a stereotype, overlearned and dominated by rule of authority?" Parents tend to differ in their basic orientation towards themselves and their children. They differ in recollection of their childhood experiences, in the kind the of education they have obtained, in the career lines they chosen, and in the kind of intellectual environment have they provide in their homes. They also differ in their attitudes towards their children, their education and as to the qualities they would like their children to have.
Freud (1924) strongly emphasized that "Parental influence during' early childhood years had a profound, irreversible effect upon subsequent personality growth.In every individual's life one can observe the effect of the pressure of society, as represented by parents, relatives, teachers, peer and friends towards the formation of a more or less definite, closed view of life and the world, a certain code bf behaviour as well as very definite view about things and people and what they are there for. These views may be explicit or implicit. The .parents answer the child's endless questions and their answers usually transmit the labels of the culture. The names of things, whether they are useful or useless, good or bad etc. In as much as all knowing, or with fear, a child accepts these views and very often with the implicit assumptions that these answers contain all there is for their subject. The same holds good for teachers.
Parents and teachers, in transmitting the current socio-cultural views of the world to the child, can help both to open and to close the world for the child. In addition to the closure of the world which results from the transmission of a familial and or cultural view point, parental curbing of the child's exploratory drive can also be a factor that interferes with the openness world of the child and often leads to a more or less powerful strengthening of the tendency to avoid the unknown and remain embedded in the familiar.
Research studies have suggested that a creative child is essentially an impulse-expressing and non-conformist. He tends to rely more on personal idiosyncratic meanings of stimuli than on objective properties, is prepared to guess, value, play and humour as a legitimate form of idea-expression and is prepared to take risks in seeking novel resolutions of data, resists authority, is prepared to ask questions and inquisitive, and sometimes prefers working independently when his interest is caught in an activity. This is often seen as antisocial by many cultures and consequently parents (Cropley, 1967). Some cultures and subsequently parents tend to crush vigorously this behaviour but some accept blindly and are permissive. It is usually accepted that the kinds of things parents value, and their ideas about what constitutes desirable and undesirable behaviour in children tends to be reflected in the behaviour patterns of their children.
Parents tend to pass on to their children a set of norms and values to modify the ways in which the child is prepared to act (Cropley,1967). Furthur more, the views held by parents are culturally derived and tend to reflect the value system current with in a culture.This state of affairs is particularly unfortunate where creativity is concerned. In this context parental values as a affective factor in encouraging, enhancing and fostering creativity in children becomes formidable. It is rightly pointed out that creativity is a cultural affair.The evidence that whatever level of creative potential is present in a child, the direction in which it is developed towards (convergence or divergence) will be partly guided by the kind of interaction the children have with their parents. In turn the parents' thinking about how their children should be treated is related to the way in which they themselves were reared and in fact to the prevailing cultural notions. If a culture imposes severe negative sanctions against certain behaviours, most parents will try to suppress these in their children, while they try to foster those behaviours of cultural norms act which the as higher culture approves. level regulators of
Hence what behaviours parents their children. rightly take into account in training The cultural standards and behaviour patterns are very complex involving not only cross cultural differences but also intra-cultural class differences based on socio-economic status considerations, caste stratifications and religion.It may therefore be concluded that, intellectual functioning of depend partly the divergent or convergent type tends to on the training which children recieve from their parents. However it does not mean to say that the child should be allowed to do whatever he likes, otherwise the child thinks that his behaviour is responsible for cultural values. Since creativity is a meaningful activity which is result oriented, a child's behaviour must end in some purposeful activity.
3.4 Negative Properties of Permissive Homes
Research in the area has revealed a number of negative properties of homes which foster an extreme preference for divergence in children. Though it is evident that parents who are permissive, foster preference for the divergent mode and those ho are intrusive and vigilant foster preference for convergence mode. Although it is also stressed that children at home must be free to function in a varied and free way as possible and that they should not be forced into convergent mode, it is argued that forcing them into a one sidedly divergent thinking style is equally undesirable. As such thinking of both high intelligence and high creativity type should be fostered.
In view of the above it is suggested that while over controlling parents produce convergent thinkers, who may be almost unable to function in a divergent situation. Likewise grossly under-controlling parents whose contacts with their children are so permissive as to constitute almost aloofness, are equally likely to raise children whose preference for divergent mode make convergent function difficult, even where some convergent activity or situation is appropriate. Hence child-rearing practices which are markedly towards either extremes inhibit the development of the kind of people who are most versatile, therefore parents' child rearing practices should maintain a equilibrium.
by Dr. Mohd Iqbal Ahmed