Recently my husband and I saw a young father down on one knee talking to his four year-old, “First we are going to zip up your jacket, and then we will take that walk after we drop this off to the car.” Dad and son, and mom with baby were across the aisle from us in a restaurant as we were having lunch, coincidentally discussing the critically important human need for image making. I had to stop the couple before they left the restaurant. They were interested in what I had to say.
Enthusiastically, I pointed out how powerful it was to prepare the boy for the upcoming activities by telling him about them. By doing this, the child naturally holds an image of what is to come. This gives a sense of predictability, reducing anxiety while increasing a sense of control and calm. Holding a self-generated image also engages important cognitive processes that feed higher level thinking and literacy development. That’s why reading and school success are so intertwined. With word and sentences, either read or heard, the child continually makes up his or her personal mental imagery. As Jeffrey Scheuer writes in his book The Sound Bite Society, “written narrative engages the mind in projecting its own internal images.”
Giving youngsters information about a future event can also help them with vocabulary development. A recent study found that knowing what will happen next can help toddlers learn new words. One of the researchers concluded: “Predictability may be an important factor to consider for understanding language and cognitive development.”
Yet, in an industry-generated popular culture that relies heavily on visual images to convey its repetitive messages, many children and teens lose sight of their own image making capabilities.
Without an understanding of themselves as image-makers, kids can also lose sight of their ability to generate their own messages, making it easier for them to think that the external media-generated visual images are their own.
Brain science from the last two decades confirms that the images we hold in our heads become powerful guides to our actions, attitudes, and beliefs. In a seminal article, David Cooperrider, pioneer in developing and forwarding Appreciative Inquiry amplifies this natural propensity of the human brain when he writes, “Much like a movie projection on a screen, human systems are forever projecting ahead of themselves a horizon of expectation that brings the future powerfully into the present as a causal agent…. The key point is that all of our cognitive capacities—perception, memory, learning—are cued and shaped by the images projected through our expectancies. We see what our imaginative horizon allows us to see.”
William F. Lynch, Jesuit and professor of Greek philosophy emphasizes in his book, Images of Hope, “…images are far deeper and more powerful than ideas. Images are our most basic way and finally our whole way of dealing with the actual world.”
But what if most of the images kids hold in their mind are not generated from within themselves, but imposed on them from without? I believe they risk living from, and making decisions from manufactured images of “reality,” rather than relying on their own images to determine their future.
There are two distinct forms of image making—reproductive and generative. Everyone has both capacities. For instance, we reproduce or imitate what we see other people say or do. It may be local slang expressions. Or we may mimic a friend’s speech patterns or a role-model’s philosophy. Human beings are like copy machines in this way.
However, when we put together a recipe based on several favorites, or when we write an original poem, make up a song, or figure out how to stay within a budget, we are using a generative imagination. Taking bits of this experience and that experience, combining past and present knowledge, making some future estimates, and adding it all together to make something new for ourselves. Our new creation has been made possible because we went beyond mere reproduction of something we have seen or heard to employing a wide array of internal images to generate something unique, something only we could create, something relevant to our own life.
A young child taking in four to five hours a day of industry-generated images can come to rely more on a reproductive imagination than on a generative one. Using only a reproductive imagination is extremely limiting. For healthy play that promotes healthy humans, children must bring in real-world experiences into their play scenarios. Added to what the child has seen in a film, for instance, there might be characters the child made up from books someone has read to him, plot ideas from Grandfather’s stories, and dialogue from something he overheard while at the library. Instead of merely mimicking external media images, now the child is using internally generated images to create a personalized play experience.
Using various images from the real world in their play is absolutely necessary for children to grow up emotionally healthy. The fact that many children onlyimitate what they see in the media for their pretend play is a cause for widespread alarm and significant intervention methods.
By practicing reproduction of industry-generated messages day in and day out, without role-playing other experiences, the child becomes a commoditized vessel.
Industry-generated images and feelings saturate his self-identity. It’s not surprising that the child’s choices begin to align with these predominate inner pictures. It becomes easier, then, to kick and shove because the inner mental model the child holds is one of kicking and shoving.
When Jerome Bruner, a cognitive psychologist, made the following statement in 1975, I doubt whether he knew he was giving parents of the 21stcentury a warning: “Play is the serious business of childhood…it’s how a child learns society’s rule systems for social restraint.”But this is only true if children are imitating images of people demonstrating social restraint. Back in 1975, it was just assumed that children imitated the positive adult roles around them and then make up their own play from a broad-base of experiences. Not so today. Play is still the serious business of childhood. But we have to differentiate between imitative play based solely on acting out industry-generated images and generative play based on images that are self-constructed from diverse experiences. What Bruner didn’t have to consider in 1975 was that by imitating anti-social, or even deviant images, the young child can no longer be expected to absorb appropriate feeling states to learn social restraint and make healthy decisions in a social context. Rather, the child learns to push, shove, and kick. Hurting other people or dominating through force becomes an almost unconscious decision. If a child’s play centers around negative images, the child’s proclivities are reinforced rather than redirected. Continually imitating such behaviors, the child is trapped in an abyss of a repetitive, limited emotional repertoire. He becomes distanced from his internal image-making processes. And it’s a long climb out if parents don’t intentionally provide replacement real-world positive, healthy images.
Explaining to children and teens about an upcoming future event is a great practice that enhances generative image-making capacities.
Along with that I urge you to:
Read to your child (and teen!) at least a half-hour every day. Make sure audio books, stories, poetry, folk tales, and myths and legends are readily available so he/she can choose to listen to them as replacement to screen time. No generative-image making capacitates are built during screen time since the literal image is always given..
In addition:
Play word games, sing songs, rhymes, chants often. Immerse your family in the lusciousness of language and you build your kids’ higher level thinking skills naturally, with ease. For young children, make up dialogues for lots of puppet play. With older kids and teens, discuss books, ideas, opinions around the dinner table as much as possible. Tell many stories—real and made-up ones. Immerse your child in listening to language. You will not regret it. When children are read to often and have daily experiences listening to language, they do well in school, are capable of self-control and self-direction, and express their ideas and feelings coherently.
Plus they grow with image-making capacities more likely to “think out of the box” to become future innovators and inspiring leaders.