Creativity and Bufflebum

When putting their daughter to bed, Nick Wilkie and his wife sometimes make up stories for her, especially if she doesn’t want to pick a book to read.

Sharing the experience and love of reading has been important to their relationships. As Nick told me, “I love reading and always have. I really wanted my daughter to love reading, too, so I’ve read to her pretty much every day since she was born.”

His love of reading and of his daughter led to intentional action, and one of the stories they created, Quiet Down, Bufflebum!, has taken on a fuller life past just a one-time story at bedtime: Nick and his wife created a video for it and hope to publish it as a book so that they can share the story with a wider audience. If you get a moment, watch their video below. I have a very different accent than Nick, who’s narrating, so just listening to him read this was worth it alone.

Sharing the things we love with our children enriches our lives and theirs, and the ways we can share with them can take many forms, not to be diminished in their value. Like Nick, I love sharing books and the joys of reading with my daughter, but I am not creative in the ways that make me likely to make a video. I have friends who are more inclined to help children develop coding projects or even take journeys in the woods or camping trips. Creation isn’t solely restricted to things that you can touch. As Nancy Andreasen said in The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius, the school teacher making lesson plans to excite her students is performing a creative process.

Creativity can take many forms, and I don’t know that any are necessarily better than others. If we share our passion and love with children, even those who aren’t our own but just in our world, we cannot help but craft better lives and richer minds.