.png)
Why is imagination so important to develop in childhood?
When we think of imagination, we often dismiss it as something whimsical, even unproductive—a world of fantasy that stands apart from reality. Daydreaming may seem counter to developing academic skills or achieving tangible goals, but at Wonderstruck, we’re here to change that perception. Imagination isn’t just about silly fun. It’s a foundational skill that fosters resilience, hope, confidence, and self-esteem—qualities that shape successful, self-assured adults. Pretend play is more than just make-believe; it’s a vital practice that equips children to thrive in both their inner and outer worlds. Developing these skills in kids means the difference between successful adults and those who struggle to value themselves or feel in control of their own lives.
Imagination means resilience and overcoming adversity.
Imagination cultivates resilience because Imagination opens the possibility for hope. When we face hurdles in our lives, our ability to get through them is dependent on our mental toughness. That mental toughness isn’t just about a ‘pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps’ ideology, it’s more than that. Mental toughness means being able to imagine and visualize improvement. If someone cannot conceive of a better situation when things get tough, they will be unable to make the choices necessary to get themselves out of a bad spot. Imagining and visualizing success is key to getting through the tough stuff of life. Researchers have known about the link between hope and imagination for decades. Renowned education expert Herbert Kohl explained it this way in an article for Child and Youth Net:
“The imagination does not merely represent the everyday physical and social world. It conceives of other possible worlds. And it is this opening of possibility that leads to hope. If the world can be imagined to be different and if young people have experiences imagining better, more caring possibilities, they have a resource from which to draw on their own strengths.”
Imagination opens worlds. At Wonderstruck Camp and Events in North Vancouver, British Columbia, those words are filled with woodland elves, garden fairies, and deep-sea mermaids. Those fantasy creatures might seem silly and unrelated to the values of cultivating serious, successful kids, youth and adults who thrive in the ‘real’ world. The skill of imagination is far from a silly fantasy. In reality, the skill of imagination is an important one for creating hope, and hope is a research-backed indicator for real-world success.
Hope means real-world success.
Hope is a research-backed indicator of real-world success. Hope is associated with better social and emotional skills and academic success for university students. Students who are more hopeful are better positioned to tackle social and emotional problems. They are more likely to stay in school, and more likely to succeed in school as well as outside of school. Hope is not just being optimistic or thinking everything is going to turn out fine.
According to psychology, hope is an active process. Hope is not the same as optimism, which can be unrealistic and even toxic. Hope, in contrast, is grounded in reality and requires active participation to make progress. John Parsi, former head of the Centre for the Advanced Study and Practice of Hope at Arizona State University, explained:
“Hope requires a person to take responsibility for their wants and desires and take action in working towards them. Optimistic people see the glass as half full, but hopeful people ask how they can fill the glass full.”
Hope is about taking control of your circumstances and creating the future you want. This is why, at Wonderstruck.ca, we know the future belongs to dreamers. Dreaming and imagining are not just ‘pie-in-the-sky’ concepts with no basis in reality. Dreaming and cultivating imagination is the foundation for success. Learning to dream and imagine is a real life skill that opens the door for hope, confidence and success. This can help shed light on why imagining success can be so transformative.
Imagining success creates success.
You have probably heard the axiom ‘if you can dream it you can do it!’ It sounds good, but what does it really mean? It feels a bit silly, considering all of the systemic barriers that many people face. It is not possible to do anything you can dream of. Unfortunately, this disappointment can discourage many of us from dreaming at all. In reality, visualization helps athletes and others build confidence and self-belief, which makes success more likely.
World-class athletes win or lose races and games based not only on their physical training and prowess, but also because of their mental state. And that mental state is cultivated because they imagine themselves being successful. Believing that a better future is possible is what influences us to make small but important behavioral changes every day. Small, everyday decisions affect where we end up in the long-run. Belief that we can change our circumstances sets us up to make small decisions that form habits - and those habits can change our lives.
Imagining success inside their own heads (inside-world) leads to success in the real world for athletes, business leaders, and other successful people. Pretend play developes the crucial skill of imagining a world beyond what we see directly in front of us. Pretend play flexes the mental muscles required to imagine success. And that imagined success sets kids up to become youth that set goals and adults that achieve what success means to them.
Imagination creates an inside-world that shapes the outside world.
In order to understand why imagination is so important, we have to appreciate that each individual person lives inside their own head. Our experiences are subjective. Some of that subjectivity is due to positionality, which describes how relative power and social position forms identities and controls access in society. We can’t control where we start our lives when it comes to positionality. We cannot control the traumatic experiences that happen to us in childhood (or beyond it). In the best-selling conversational book What Happened to You?, Oprah and leading researcher and physician Dr.Bruce Perry explore trauma and recovery based on their combined decades of interviews and clinical work.
Each of us lives in a world of our own construction, even as adults. The ideas, thoughts, feelings and motivations inside each of us are distinct, even when we respond to the exact same set of experiences. To understand positionality a little bit better, consider the example of how different people experience the same event. For example, a fire in a school can have remarkably different effects on different people. Students evacuated during a fire feel life-altering stress and might need to deal with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after the fact. For the first responders who arrive at the fire, however, the school engulfed in flames is another day on the job. Kids who didn’t see the flames directly might remember feeling excited at the disruption in their day, like an adventure instead of a terrifying experience. The same outside stimulus means a totally different experience inside each person. Like it or not, each of us lives inside our own head.
This is why, at Wonderstruck.ca, we believe that dreams and imagination are not airy-fairy concepts. (Though we do have fairies!) The skill of imagination is seriously one of the most important things to develop in kids to help them become successful adults.
Confident kids accept and trust themselves.
Once we realize how much we live inside our own heads, we can harness the power of neuroplasticity to shape our inside-worlds. Through discipline and intentionality, we can rewire our brain’s connections to a great degree. And that rewiring requires a lot of imagination. It requires us to believe in ourselves and to imagine ourselves in a better place than we are now. Imagination can help us believe in ourselves. This brings us to another related concept that is also linked to successful life outcomes: confidence.
Kids who experience an elementary school fire cannot control what they saw, or their initial emotional reaction to it. These things are not their fault or responsibility. How they move forward depends on the support they receive as well as on personal decisions they make about how to react to their experiences. Every childhood has some adversity or challenge to overcome. Not all of it is extremely traumatic, but each kid needs resilience to become a successful adult.
Confidence is not feeling great about yourself all the time. Confidence means accepting where you are and who you are, and believing you have the tools (or can acquire the tools) needed to get to where you want to be. Confidence is about acceptance, self-trust and control over your own life outcomes. Confidence is not about believing you are better than anyone else; it is about self-acceptance and personal progress.
Confidence and self-esteem are related concepts. Self-confidence is about believing in yourself, while self-esteem is about appreciation and value you hold for yourself. Kids who have higher self-esteem are able to try again when they fail the first time. Self-esteem helps them cope with making mistakes. Confidence is developed as kids create their own solutions and solve problems on the way to achieving goals that are important to them. The bottom line is: Imagination and pretend-play help develop kids’ ability to envision themselves overcoming obstacles. That cultivates hope, confidence and self-esteem, all of which are crucial skills for a successful life.
Cultivating positive thinking in our inside-worlds has a statistically significant impact on lifespan, too. If you need any more convincing about the importance of cultivating a positive inside-world, look no further than a study on nuns. Nuns have uniform lives on the outside. They dedicate themselves to the church, so there are no factors related to families or careers that affect their life outcomes. A study of 180 nuns showed a significant difference in life expectancy based on whether the nuns’ letters had a positive or negative bias. The nuns who wrote positive letters when they were younger lived almost 10 years longer on average than the negative nuns. Now that is a real-world result based on how the world is imagined or perceived.
Wonderstruck.ca is here to build confident, resilient, successful kids using the power of imagination.
Kids’ experiences early in life set them up to have the confidence and resilience they need to be successful adults. Wonderstruck’s programming through kids’ summer camps, Pro-D Day camps, March Break camps and birthday and event planning, open up spaces for imagination that make a real difference in the minds and the lives of children. Engaging in an imagined world through magic potions, pretend play and fantasy experiences helps kids develop real skills. At Wonderstruck, when we say dreams are our power, we mean it. The power to dream and imagine is one of the most powerful things we’ve got. And that’s why pretend play is seriously important.
Comentários