Kids start out wildly creative, and the research says most of them lose it. In one well known study, 98% of young children scored at genius level on a creative thinking test. By age 15, only 12% did. I find that hard to shake. The hopeful part is real, though: kids who practice creating do measurably better.
Every parent knows the before picture. A five year old hands you a drawing of a dog that is also a boat, and she is not embarrassed by it. She is proud. Ten years later, a lot of those same kids will tell you they cannot draw. Nothing about their hands changed. Something about their confidence did, and the research below puts numbers on it.
The drop, in numbers
The first set of numbers comes from George Land and Beth Jarman. In the late 1960s they built a test of divergent thinking for NASA, which wanted a way to spot engineers who could solve problems nobody had solved before. Divergent thinking means coming up with many possible answers to one open question. Land later gave the same test to 1,600 children ages 3 to 5. 98% of them scored at what the researchers called creative genius level. The study is written up in their book Breakpoint and Beyond, and this summary walks through the numbers year by year.
Then they kept testing the same children. At age 10, 30% still scored at that level. At 15, it was 12%. When more than 280,000 adults took the test, the average came out at 2%. Land's conclusion was blunt, and honestly I have not found a better way to put it: non-creative behavior is learned.
One study could be a fluke, so here is a second one, much bigger. Kyung Hee Kim analyzed 272,599 Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking given between 1966 and 2008 for her paper The Creativity Crisis, published in the Creativity Research Journal in 2011. Creativity scores rose for decades, then turned. From about 1990 on, they fell steadily, and the steepest drops were in the youngest kids, kindergarten through third grade.
The detail I keep coming back to is elaboration. That is the skill of taking an idea and developing it, pushing on it to see where it can go. Between 1984 and 2008, elaboration scores fell by more than a full standard deviation. More than 85% of children tested in 2008 scored lower on that skill than the average child in 1984. And kids were not getting less capable across the board. Over the same years, IQ scores kept rising. They got better at finding the one right answer and worse at imagining several possible ones.
The Houston case study
All of that raises an obvious question. If creativity fades with disuse, can practice protect it? A team in Houston ran the strongest kind of test there is on that question, a randomized controlled trial, the same design used to test new medicines.
The Houston Arts Access Initiative covered 10,548 students in grades 3 to 8, across 42 schools. Schools were picked by lottery. The winning schools got a large influx of arts experiences during the school day, delivered by local arts organizations, cultural institutions, and working teaching artists. The other schools carried on as usual. Researchers Daniel Bowen and Brian Kisida then compared the two groups. You can read the full study summary yourself, including how the lottery worked and what they measured.
The arts group did better on things most parents would not predict from art class. The share of students receiving disciplinary infractions fell by 3.6 percentage points. Scores on the state writing test rose by 0.13 of a standard deviation, a real gain for one school year. Compassion for others rose too, by 0.08 of a standard deviation. Among elementary students, who made up 86% of the study, the researchers also found more school engagement, higher college aspirations, and more empathy. The gains were strongest for elementary kids, for students still learning English, and for gifted students. I will be honest, the discipline number is the one that surprised me most. Art class is not where most of us would look for better behavior.
And notice what the Houston kids did not get. Nobody lectured them about creativity. They got regular time making things, with real artists in the room. The making was the intervention. The changes showed up in their writing, in their behavior, and in how they treated each other.
What this means at home
You cannot rerun your child's school day, and most of us cannot put a teaching artist on the payroll. But the shape of the Houston result is something a family can copy at small scale. Regular time each week. A real practitioner teaching live. Work that ends in something finished your kid can point to. Room for their own ideas instead of copying a sample.
It does not need to be a big commitment to count. A Saturday morning class counts. So does one finished project on the fridge. That is the thinking behind two recent posts here, three things your kid can still make before Halloween and letting your kid direct Halloween night. Different season, same idea. A kid, a real teacher, and something real at the end.
That is how Wimzee classes are built. Every class is live, taught by a working artist, writer, musician, or maker, in a small group or one on one. Your kid is not watching a recording. They are making something with a person who does this for a living, and they finish with work that is theirs.
If you are still deciding what might fit, take the quiz. Answer a few questions about your kid and what they gravitate toward, and it will point you to the class that fits. One class is enough to see how your kid responds to making something real with a real teacher. And if a short list is more your speed, I pulled five together below, all new on Wimzee and none of them featured here before.
None of this is about raising a prodigy. It is about the five year old with the dog that is also a boat. That drawing is not a phase to grow out of. It is a person with a working imagination, and imagination holds up when it gets used. What is your kid making these days?
Five places to start this week
Five classes, five kinds of making. Every one of them is new on Wimzee, and every one ends with something a kid can point to and say, I made that.
Start with the notebook doodler, the kid drawing little figures in the margins of everything. In Maya's Animation class, kids learn hand-drawn animation, stop-motion, and computer animation, and they bring characters of their own to life a frame at a time. Maya graduated from CalArts with a degree in Experimental Animation and has six years of teaching art behind her. Her favorite is stop-motion, quirky characters brought to life one picture at a time. Book a spot in Animation, or meet Maya first and see what she makes.
For the kid who cannot hear music without moving, there is Dance Creative Connections, a group class for ages 6 to 12. Kids try beginner friendly movement, take on creative challenges together, share ideas, and practice giving each other respectful feedback. It is dance, but it is also teamwork practice in disguise. Ms. A is a dance coach and theater educator with more than 12 years of experience in dance, and no prior dance experience is needed to join hers. Book a spot in Dance Creative Connections, or meet Ms. A.
Some kids do not stop at reading stories. They invent the hero, the villain, and the world they live in. Ari teaches Learn How to Make Your Own OC, for ages 10 to 18, where kids build an original character from their own imagination, get help with anatomy and proportions, and write the character's own story. Elves, humans, heroes, villains, all fair game. Ari is an illustrator who loves teaching kids to draw in a style that is theirs, not a copy of hers. Book a spot in Learn How to Make Your Own OC, or meet Ari.
Then there is the table drummer. Every family has one. Rich Mossman teaches Exploring Drums and Rhythm for Parents and Kids, one on one lessons across drum set, hand drums, and orchestral percussion. He teaches drumming the way you would teach a language, with attention to how the instrument feels, stick control, reading, and actually playing in every session. Rich has more than 30 years of experience teaching drum set, and his lessons are personal and cumulative, each one building on the last. Book a spot in Exploring Drums and Rhythm for Parents and Kids, or meet Rich.
And for the littlest kids, ages 3 to 9, Sheradon Jackson runs Fruitful Adventures, a group adventure built around fruit. Each session picks a featured fruit and follows it everywhere: where it grows, its colors and textures, a taste, some movement and dance, a creative activity, and a round of positive affirmations to finish. Sheradon is a certified juice therapist and holistic wellness educator, and she is a mom herself, which probably explains why the class sounds like play from start to finish. Book a spot in Fruitful Adventures, or meet Sheradon.
Questions parents ask
Is creativity a talent kids are born with, or a skill they can build?
Both, in a way. Kids start with plenty of it. The research above suggests it fades without use and holds up with practice, much like fitness. A class does not install creativity. It gives it regular work to do.
My kid says they are just not creative. What do I do with that?
Treat it as a fit problem, not a fact. Creativity is wider than drawing. It is also building, cooking, music, stories, and code. Start from what your kid already reaches for.
How much practice does it take to matter?
The Houston program added many arts experiences across a school year, so that study gives no magic number. For a family, one regular weekly class is a sensible start. What matters most is that it keeps happening and ends in finished work.
What should I look for in a creative class for my kid?
A teacher who practices the craft for real, teaching live rather than on a recording. Space for your kid's own ideas, not just copying an example. And something finished at the end that your kid can show you.
Sources
Every number in this post comes from one of these three studies. Read them yourself:
Land, G. and Jarman, B., Breakpoint and Beyond, 1992. The divergent thinking study first built for NASA. Summary of the study and its numbers.
Kim, K. H., "The Creativity Crisis," Creativity Research Journal, 2011. Analysis of 272,599 Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. A readable summary of her findings.
Bowen, D. H. and Kisida, B., "Investigating Causal Effects of Arts Education Experiences," Houston Education Research Consortium, 2019, and Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2023. The study page with methods and full results, and the ERIC record for the journal version.
