How Walt Would Have Done It
Raising !magineers: The Way Walt Disney Would Have Brought Up His Kids Today
Growing children by giving them the freedom to discover, identify and deeply engage with their innate passions, and providing them the supports to achieve creative expressions of their dreams
“I want to have ten kids, and I’m going to let them do anything they want.”
~Walt Disney
I grew up a daydreamer.
Like the Dead Sea with no outlet streams, my active and febrile imagination received many imprints. But I had precious little opportunity to express it in tangible ways.
After I became introduced to video games in elementary school, I spent hours dreaming up and writing out video game ideas on paper. Then I would fantasize about getting them to game publishers to make.
In 2nd grade, I took a computing class where we wrote BASIC computer programs on paper. I then had to run them in my head because I had no computer, nor access to one.
As a child, I wanted to be a pilot; Orville and Wilbur Wright were my childhood idols. That desire morphed over time to wanting to become an aerospace engineer.
In a similar spirit to the aviation pioneers, I set about assembling aerofoils and wing cambers out of any material I could lay my hands on — styrofoam, cardboard, aluminum foil. And I would conduct aerodynamic ‘wind tunnel’ experiments under a running tap!
I fed my imagination. I read tons. I scavenged for knowledge. I watched Saturday morning cartoons. But with little outlet opportunities, I resorted to spending daylight hours constructing paracosms. I spun fantastic worlds intertwined with even more fantastic worlds.
Coming of Age in the 80s
Growing up in the 1980s in the quiet, university town of Enugu, Nigeria there was practically only one outlet for a boy — street football.
Okay, there was kite-flying. And barrow racing. And tree climbing. But there were precious little intellectual heights to climb in those.
So I spent my free time, of which I had aplenty, meandering through the streets in my neighborhood, seeking to sate my searing curiosity. And when I exhausted streets nearby, I hiked to neighborhoods farther away and did the same.
After I graduated high school, I adopted the hobby of riding the various bus routes, from terminus to terminus, filling my intellectual storehouse with vicarious knowledge.
Library Oasis
One place that came to serve as an oasis for me was the town library.
There I got to leave the hot, dusty world behind and enmesh myself in books of all shapes, colors, sizes… All with the same strong, musty smell of books housed in containment.
I took repeated flights of fancy with Enid Blyton and her Famous Five, as well as her Secret Seven. With the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. With Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.
And when I exhausted the children’s section, even though I was still under-aged, I won permission to move over to the adult’s section.
I felt all grown up.
But all that was still input. I had no expressions. Precious little output.
I spoke very little. (I had a short stint on a debating team in 3rd grade).
I wrote very little. (School essays and a couple of pen pals was about it).
And I used my hands even less. I did a few really good still life drawings in 1st-grade. In 3rd-grade, I made a can opener in metalwork class. I planted a series of eucalyptus trees, which all died, as a 4th-grade class assignment. And I kept a crop farm in 5th grade.
But none of that resulted in any sustained expression.
So when my wife and I were deciding where to start and raise our family, it was absolutely crucial for me that we did so in a place where they could not only nurture their imaginations, but where they would have the opportunities to form deep engagement with their innate passions, and be able to express them in a Hundred Languages.
Sim Racer
As I have written elsewhere, our first child is utterly devoted to auto racing. This is a passion he has borne from toddlerhood, right through now to teenagehood.
He nourishes this passion in many ways — building and playing with a large collection of model toy cars. Reading car magazines and car racing fiction series. Following Formula 1 car racing, or more correctly, following Sebastian Vettel, who competes in Formula 1.
His abiding occupation now is online sim auto racing. His abiding desire right now is to become a Formula 1 race driver.
But in addition he is building a digital media strand — running a YouTube channel. And recently has started dabbling into merchandising — opening a Teespring T-shirt store.
We encourage and feed his passion.
Last Christmas we bought him a wheel and pedal driving setup for his sim races. This summer we took our family vacation in Munich, primarily to tour the BMW Museum and Factory and get him as close to a BMW i8 as possible.
A Hundred Paths
Society has been suckered into an almost now unquestioned myth that the only path to establishing an independent existence is to go to school, learn useful things, jump through test and exam hoops, gain a degree, and then get a job.
Young people are often dissuaded from pursuing eclectic paths that follow their passions simply on the basis that doing so would not put food on the table.
Hence we allow childhood some freedom to pursue flights of fancies (freedoms which are increasingly being removed), but rein those back in the teenage years to focus on the college-to-career track.
Flights of fancy can often be just that — flights of fancy. But the trade-off is not our imagination against reality. The grand challenge of life is how to wangle our dreams into concrete manifestations. How to engineer our imaginations into real-world implementations.
And of parenting, how to enable our children to become Imagineers.
To Imagineering and Beyond
As a parent, I have dedicated myself to enabling our 3 kids to go as far as they can dream, without limitation. This involves helping them nurture the most animated, vivid imaginations they can muster. Most parents do. But that’s where they stop. And then hand their kids over to school.
I have committed to go beyond. To coach them to become magicians — uniting art and science to turn fantasy into reality, dreams into magic. To adopt the spirit of Walt Disney in mentoring them to become Imagineers. So they do not stop just at dreaming, but pursue, with all their ability, creative expressions to their vibrant imaginations.
There are 3 steps to my method.
1. Uncover Passions
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
~Walt Disney
The first goal is to help my children discover their predilections and passions early in life.
Our first child is a gearhead. Our last child is animated by drawing anime. Our middle child…well, he’s a middle child. Seemingly the child with the highest curiosity quotient, it appears that abundance of choice has not let him settle on a _dominant passion_ yet. Like a bowerbird afflicted with a strong dose of shiny object syndrome, he has flitted from interests as diverse as archery to drones. But for now, he appears to have developed a more sustained passion, for food.
2. Cultivate Creative Capital
“Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.”
~Walt Disney
Next is to help them nurture and cultivate a deep engagement with the passions they identify.
I have described above how we encourage our gearhead to nurture his passion. Our young animator has a mini-studio set up with a graphics drawing tablet and trawls YouTube for animator influencers to learn from. While our junior Masterchef has enrolled in a variety of children’s cooking programs.
3. Pursue Tangible Expressions
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”
~Walt Disney
The third step then is to encourage them to extend their accumulating creative capital to actual productions they can share.
Gearhead does this largely through creating YouTube videos. Animator is working on her first animated short film. And foodie — well he occasionally makes dinner for the family!
I grew up a daydreamer.
But I am raising my kids to be Imagineers!
Yet Imagineering is not only for our children. It is for the child within each of us. Inside every grown-up is a child longing to dream freely again. So I encourage you, even as you raise your children to take on the world, to also take care to reawaken that spark, to touch base with your inner child, and to honor the dreamer you once were, too.
“That’s the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget.”
~Walt Disney
Update (25 Sep 2021): PlayWorx is currently on sabbatical.
At present, I am blogging exclusively at The Global Careerist.
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If you are a parent of a t(w)een, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly PlayWorx Insights email and join other perceptive parents who are already benefiting from this ‘front-side seat’ into another way to grow t(w)eens!
I champion parents of t(w)eens to become intentional in nurturing them as Imagineers, enabling them engineer their imaginative and creative ideas into productive and practical forms, thus empowering them to masterfully navigate and thrive in an Age of Massive Disruption.
I do this by writing a Medium publication, speaking at events and cooking up ingenious ways to spread the PlayWorx Method message of emphasizing nurturing of bold imagination and building of sustained creative capital during the t(w)eens years.
If you are a parent of a t(w)een, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly PlayWorx Insights email and join other perceptive parents who are already benefiting from this ‘front-side seat’ into another way to grow t(w)eens!
