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September 15, 2025

**The Power of The Dot in Building Early Childhood Creativity**

It’s easy to envision finger paint, block structures, or pretend play when we hear the term creativity in early childhood. But creativity is so much more than activities—most of all, it’s about how children view themselves as creators. Few books do this lesson better than Peter H. Reynolds’ The Dot.

First published in 2003, The Dot is the story of Vashti, a little girl who believes that she “just can’t draw.” Tenderly encouraged by her teacher to “make a mark and see where it takes you,” Vashti starts to discover her own possibilities. A dot on a piece of paper is a journey of self-expression, courage, and discovery.

Why The Dot Is Important to Understanding Creativity Early On

1. Creativity starts with courage

At times, children may second-guess themselves when they compare their abilities to other people’s. The Dot shows that creativity is not dependent on being perfect; it’s getting the first step out the door—no matter if that step is small or fuzzy.

2. Encouragement releases hidden potential

Vashti’s transformation begins because an adult believed in her. Early childhood educators, parents, and caregivers play a critical role in sparking creativity by creating environments where children feel safe to experiment without fear of failure.

3. A small mark can grow into something bigger

For children, creativity starts with modest action: scrawling on paper, a block balanced on another, a made-up word in a story. The Dot implies that such modest beginnings matter. When we honor children’s little efforts, they can make incredible and powerful things.

4. Creativity is about identity

By the end of the book, Vashti not only asserts herself as an artist, but also inspires another child to do the same. This is a valuable reflection of the nature of early childhood creativity: it states the way in which children see themselves as thinkers, makers, and contributors.

How Educators and Families Can Use The Dot

Encourage risk-taking-After reading, have children “make a mark” in whatever way they wish—drawing, building, or writing. Value their uniqueness.
Celebrate process, not product-Like Vashti, children thrive when adults value effort and experiment over end results.
Model creativity-Show children your “dots” too—doodling, humming, or crafting—and illustrate that adults can learn too.
Promote a culture of encouragement-Encourage children to believe that every child is valuable, however small, to give to others.

A Story that Grows with Children

The beauty of The Dot is in its simplicity. It speaks to preschoolers just starting to experiment with their creative wings and to older children learning about determination and self-confidence. To parents and teachers, it’s a gentle but powerful reminder: building creativity is not about producing masterpieces, it’s about creating a mindset where every child can visualize that he or she can leave his or her mark.

As Peter Reynolds so beautifully illustrates, creativity begins the instant we believe we can. And occasionally, a single dot is enough.

August 31, 2025

Creativity Changes Our Thinking

Since writing this book, I have been carrying the idea of creativity in my head. That new awareness of how creativity is infused into everyday life, in every conversation, in every decision, has, I can say, enhanced my life. What it has meant is a sense of hope when I face barriers or get caught in recycled thought processes.

Let’s talk about barriers and recycled thought processes. The barriers I face are mainly other people who don’t agree with my approach to moving forward. Either at home or work, we pursue our daily tasks, our yearly resolutions, or our lifetime goals. These are necessary activities to survive and have a life of meaning and purpose. But life circumstances and other people’s agendas can get in the way of those pursuits. It stops us. It stymies us. It frustrates us. Sometimes our reactions make things worse. Creativity proposes an alternative strategy.

Creativity asks: what is something new and effective that can be added to our understanding or strategies of what we should do next? I don’t know about you, but I like having a set of choices rather than being forced to take one. That is especially true when the one option is something I tried before and in which I have no confidence of success in its implementation.

Thinking creatively about such dilemmas make us ask what has not been tried before. In other words, what is new? And then consider all those new alternatives through a lens of effectiveness, promise of success, likely to contribute to attaining our goals.

I recently heard a story from a woman who was talking about a childhood friend. This friend was perfect in every way. She excelled at school, getting not only As in all her classes but As on all her assignments. She focused her attention on how to succeed at each level, put the effort needed to be successful, and, guess what, she was remarkably successful. Then in her sophomore year of college she got a B on an assignment. Her entire paradigm for how to succeed in life was upended. How now was she supposed to succeed? She did what she needed to do and it suddenly stopped working. (Mind you, she got a B, a grade that would satisfy most students.)

She was so fixated on success as she defined it, that this was a terrible blow to her. She ended up dropping the class. And then, since she was an identified failure, dropped out of school and was pregnant with a year. It was as if she stopped living her life and instead had life live her. She forewent her agency. Her inability to survive a single setback betrayed to me a lack of creativity. She could not imagine a world where she could have a B and still move through life with confidence, hope and aspirations.

This is precisely what I mean by how creativity can become a central part of our every day thinking about life. Creativity can be a mode of living because its inherent drive is to generate purposeful newness into every moment.

You can believe me or not. But I challenge you to bring to mind creativity when you face your next barrier or our trapped in a cycle of repetitive thinking. What is a new thing you can imagine? What new thing can you imagine that seems within the realm of possibility to occur?

We write in the book that creativity is about originality + usefulness. When you face that time of obstacle or looping thought, stop and ask your creative self: What else do you have for me? What new idea do you have for this situation? Be still and engage your default network (confused? Read chapter five.) I promise you that it will not let you down if you are patient and mannerly. If creativity can serve you in this moment, why do we not bring it into every moment of our living?

That’s what I have been experiencing since writing this book. And it is making me even more convinced about what we say about creativity in our book.

August 30, 2025

How My Learning Disability Shaped the Book

I never considered that I would be a writer when I grew up. In fact, even the idea of writing more than a paragraph used to scare me. With a learning disability, attending school was like climbing uphill with heavy loads on my back. Reading was tiring, writing was annoying, and I always compared myself to others.

There were periods when I sat at the kitchen table, homework in hand, trying to set down the words from my head on to [TR1] paper. What was as clear as crystal in my head turned into a jumble when I tried to write it down. I can still remember the frustration of looking at the sheet of paper, knowing I had something but not being able to capture it in a shape that made sense.

Because of that, I wasted a large portion of my childhood doubting myself. If I was struggling this much with writing, how was I ever going to create something as monumental as a book?

But here’s the twist of fate: my learning disability compelled me to think differently. Since the “linear” route of learning wasn’t possible, I had to drive around. I embraced creativity, experiential learning, and storytelling. I noticed details that others overlooked, I perceived connections others didn’t, and I learned to communicate in ways beyond the typical assignments. Looking back, those detours were teaching me about creative thinking.

Flash forward to when I began writing Creativity in Young Children: What Science Tells Us and Our Hearts Knows. Those same fears crept back. Could I really do this? Could I take decades of research and lived experience and make them comprehensible and meaningful? It was a painful process—sometimes agonizing.

But I also made a critical discovery: every time I hit a wall, I was living the book’s very message. Being creative doesn’t mean doing things correctly, it means hanging in there, imagining, and allowing yourself to try again. My disability, something I thought would be my limitation, became my reminder that creativity thrives in the messy process of figuring it out.

In so many ways, the book became greater than a project. Writing proved that differently wired kids can become adults who make, write, and share their voice. Writing proved that what science teaches us about the value of creativity is linked to what our hearts already understand: every child is creative and has something special to give. We must honor these inherent abilities in every child.

When I look at the finished book today, I don’t just see chapters and research. I see the boy who used to sit fuming at the kitchen table, thinking he wasn’t good enough. And I see how that same boy grew into producing the book he’d thought was impossible.

Sometimes our biggest obstacle is the very thing that inspires our best work.

April 6, 2025

ADHD Myths

Scott Barry Kaufman has an article out in the online edition of Psychology Today
entitled, “ADHD Isn’t A Trauma Reaction.” Since our book looks at ADHD (or attention-
deficit/hyperactivity disorder) in the context of creativity, we were interested in reading more, and maybe even updating what we wrote in our book.

According to Kaufman, “ADHD is a combination of different extreme personality traits that are related to each other but exist on a continuum among all of us.” This includes low organization and attentional control and high impulsivity and risk-taking.”

He maintains that ADHD is not caused by trauma but is based on an individual’s
genetics. Of course, early childhood trauma is bad for any child, and one with ADHD
may have fewer coping abilities and thus suffer more, but ADHD is not caused by such experiences.

This may be the biggest surprise of all. “ADHD is not an illness,” Kaufman writes.
Instead, we should think of it as a way of describing some unique neurological
characteristics that are especially pronounced in certain people. As he beautifully writes, “While ADHD is associated with a range of adverse life outcomes, there are also a lot of benefits in our society to people who do not conform, who are risk-takers, who do not “play nice”, and who have a rich imagination.”

That last phrase is what really jumped out to us. We say in our book (see Chapter 6)
that ADHD may in fact contribute to creativity. We explore in the chapter about autism and ADHD, and how people with these diagnoses experience and interact with the world around. And they do it in different ways. But guess what, there is no one “right” way to thinking, learning or behaving. There are just different ways. Individuals who are neurodiverse (that is, their brains work in ways that are more likely to be different than others) can, at times, explain why and how they are creative. They bring us new thoughts and new ways of being. In fact, we list six why ADHD may support creativity. Whether you call them traits, disorders or diseases: sometimes they bring out things that should be celebrated.

The topics in this chapter, and in Kaufman’s article, hit home for Zach, because he had the “disability” label slapped on him at an early age. Rather than helping provide
individualized supports, it became a way to isolate and exclude him from his peers. He hated the term. As Zach wrote in the chapter, “when educators and caregivers focus on innate creativity and its connection to individual identity, self-worth and self-esteem, they help students make progress across educational requirements.

I will leave Kaufman with the last word:

“I believe the truth about ADHD offers more hope for human agency than
either environmental determinism or genetic determinism. To all those with
an ADHD diagnosis, may you live long and thrive, not trying to find ‘blame’
for who you are, but taking responsibility for your psychological makeup and
steering the course of your life in the way you truly want with self-
acceptance, self-compassion, and creativity.

March 8, 2025

Look back at a Forward

When Zach first posted on LinkedIn about the release of the book, he made a point of thanking Ryan Rydzewski for his amazing forward to our book. Our editor at Redleaf called it “absolutely wonderful.” We agree, and it fits for someone who was the co-author of When You Wonder You’re Learning: Mister Rogers’ Enduring Lessons for Raising Creative, Curious, Caring Kids. If you have not checked out his book, please do.

The book marvelously combines stories of Mister Rogers with an approach to learning based on wonder. The title of comes from a Fred Rogers song, and in an earlier and less edited-down version of our book, we quoted all the lyrics from this song because we believe there is a connection between wonder and learning. Wonder is probably what we describe in Chapter 5 as the default mode network.

Fred is encouraging children to wonder and marvel. Indeed, his show was an endless stream of things to wonder about from visits to factories to visits with neighbors engaged in playing jazz or Bach, putting frosting on cookies, or knocking down a thousand dominoes: all kinds of activities. Then, of course, in the Neighborhood of Make Believe, he reflected and processed (wondered?) about what had been experienced in the actual neighborhood.

Ryan’s book, which he co-authored with Gregg Behr, emphasized three desired
outcomes from Mister Rogers’ approach to learning: creativity, curiosity and caring.
Maybe those are the educational benchmarks we actually want our children to reach. The first two are certainly things we want to emphasize in our book.

After listening to Ryan keynote at a “Community Connections” conference Zach
organized in Boone, Iowa, he seemed the ideal person to add his thoughts about our
book. What he said was especially important because he spoke as a parent. We always saw Creativity in Young Children as a book with an audience among formal and informal educators, including parents. During its writing, we confess, it was hard to remember we were not only writing for early childhood teachers but also for Moms and Dads or Grandpas and Grandmas. Ryan reminds us that the book speaks to parents, reminding them to stop and pay attention to how our children are being creative and to value every expression. As a father, he talks about watching his son, Russell, as the two of them ride Pittsburgh’s light rail. Most of the commuters have their noses in phones or books, but Russell is gazing with wonder outside, “delighting,” Ryan writes, “in every tunnel, every bridge every car and bus that waits for the trolley to pass.” Those things may not delight Ryan, but watching them delight Russell delights Ryan.

It’s all right to wonder. It’s all right to marvel. That may be good advice for children, but it is also good advice for parents. It’s all right to wonder and marvel at just how creative and engaged our children are in the world around them, which is not quite as familiar to them as it is to us. They can stare in wonder at their own children, marveling at what they are doing and thinking and wondering about.

February 18, 2025

Creativity is connection

I (Tom Rendon) recently ran across this article. It really stood out to me because it is discussing one of the “Big Ideas” from our new book on creativity (Creativity and Young Children: What science tells us and our hearts know ). No surprise since we interviewed Scott Barry Kaufman and he was the one who introduced us to this idea about connectivity that is part of the neurological description of what is going on in the brain when we are creative. We appreciate Scott’s time talking with us, and we are so glad he continues to write about neuroscience and creativity. The bottom line: it is the connectivity not some miraculous lobe in the brain that makes us creative.

In Kaufman’s article, “Creative thinking and the balanced brain: Creative ability involves balanced switching between brain networks,” cogently summarizes one of the main points we make in chapter 5 (Big Idea #2). Please read the article, but to just make a few comments about it, I first note his point that creative people have a rich imagination but also are grounded in reality. So, there is a kind of flexibility at work when we are creative: imaginative, pie-in-the-sky along with rational, and feet solidly on the ground. As it turns out, and a theme we emphasize throughout the book, creativity is a phenomenon that is able to embrace paradox. Those two apparently different experiences (“rich imagination” and “grounded in reality”) are able to exist in a single person because their thinking moves among a set of neural networks. Kaufman calls these different networks the Executive Attention Network, the Imagination Network and the Salience Network. His point and one we emphasize in the book (thanks to his earlier work), is that creativity occurs in the flexibility of mind to switch among these different networks.

Now it may seem obvious that the “imagination network” is key to creativity and it is. But the real insight from Kaufman is that it works in tandem with other networks and creative people tend to switch between the three networks nimbly and with ease. Imagine you are just sitting around day-dream, not thinking about anything in particular, not focused on tasks to do, or obsessing about past failures and mistakes or future things that you fear will not work out well. You are in, Kaufman says, the default network. At least that is how he described it in his earlier articles. He renamed it as the “imagination network” because default seems to suggests that nothing is really going on, and yet a lot of going on and what is going on it essential for creativity. So let’s really label that and so the name was changed.

But the “default” label helps us understand that these are moments when we are without anything to do or not experiencing direct and invasive stimuli. It is our default state. How we usually are when nothing else is happening. Those moments are when truly original ideas emerge. This is why we get our best ideas in the shower or driving to work or taking a walk. We are just “being” in the world and voila, here comes a new idea. Or we are just waking up and our mind is full of dream fragments, before the worries of the day drive them out of our consciousness. That is our time of creativity or, as Kaufman would say, our time of imagination.

As important as that is, it is not the real key to understanding creativity. That comes when we realize that we shift back and forth among the networks to ground those ideas into something that actually spurs us to make something or do something. That is when creativity really comes out. And those other networks like the “executive attention” network where we can focus our attention like, as Kaufman writes, a laser beam. We are concentrating and problem-solving. Those activities are essential to creativity as well.

The final network, “salience network,” also play s a role. This network keeps tabs on external events and internal consciousness, supporting the movement of thought, handing it off to the executive network or back to the imagination network to best serve the purpose of the cognitive activity.

Kaufman recommends we pay attention to how our stream of consciousness makes these transitions to enhance our awareness of how we are being creative and harness those new ideas into better, sharper and more productive understanding of how we interact with the world.

There is lots more in the book about his idea and what we see as the implications of this on teaching young children. I also like to think that the human community works the same way. It is not our solo genius but our connections with one another that makes our world a better place.

February 7, 2025

DEI will never die

Among my (Tom’s) jobs is as an equity trainer and consultant. Suffice it to say these are not bullish times for this industry. Over the past few weeks, there has been a debate going on in the letters to the editor section of the Des Moines Register about whether DEI training is ineffective or even counter-productive. With the degrading and silencing and even outlawing of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Such woke policies are not welcome in the new Trump Administration.

That may explain why I was glad to see in a recent LinkedIn Post, Dr. Shantel Meeks Bustamante, founding director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University, continued to highlight and promote the value of DEI, especially as it relates to young children.

She writes:

“The fact that stark disparities continue to exist, indicates in the clearest terms that we’re still not living up to our nation’s stated ideals, and that more work—not less—needs to be done to protect and expand civil and human rights under the law….Until that vision becomes a reality for every child, the work of the [Children’s Equity Project] will continue, more focused on advancing civil rights than ever.”

I bring this up because we debated about whether to have a chapter on DEI in our book. What does DEI have to do with creativity? Our answer, in the book, is a firm “a lot!”

We did not want to offer the chapter (9) as a kind of pro forma acknowledgement of this topic. Instead, we wanted to ground it in the lived experience of children of color.

So when Shantel writes about the stark realities of inequity and structural bias, it is not something we can ignore.

“We know that still today, maternal and infant mortality rates are three times higher for Black moms & babies than white moms & babies, even when Black families’ income and education levels are higher. The percentage of AI/AN [native/indigenous] and Black children under 5 living in poverty is nearly three times the percentage of white children living in poverty. Immigrant children who have been forcibly separated from their families are more likely to experience toxic levels of stress and long-term adverse health and developmental outcomes. School districts with the highest percentage of students of color receive 16% less state and local funding than those with the fewest students of color. Black students, starting in preschool, are more likely to be harshly disciplined, even though their behavior is not different than their white peers. Preschoolers with disabilities are still more likely to be educated in segregated settings, even though it is their civil right to be included, and research shows that inclusion is associated with the best outcomes for them and their peers. Latino students remain the most segregated racial/ethnic group in the nation. And, although research finds that dual language education is the gold standard for multilingual students, only 8% of [English Learners] have access, limiting access to grade-level curriculum and educational opportunity more broadly.”

Does anyone think these numbers will improve in the next four years with the current administration? Not only are DEI efforts being defunded and shut-down, but the institutions and programs that were implementing effective responses to equity concerns are being defunded and its practioners put out of work. Shantel is right to remind us about the importance of continuing equity work. As the attacks on DEI grow, the need for its perspective and to prioritize addressed equity disproportionality grows as well.

We took an approach in Chapter 9 of first explaining carefully how the early childhood field defines these three terms and describing what we knew about disproportionality around creativity supports. We did not see DEI as a way to make white people feel guilty or sound off about how bad America is. We used it to provide a needed perspective on everything we talked about in the book through the lens race and ethnicity. It turns out that lens allows us to see things that were not visible before. It is about how to make everything more fair. Writing a chapter on DEI was a way to better and more fully explore creativity in young children.

What Shantel writes is that until these disparities are addressed, the Children’s Equity Project will still need to exist. And maybe chapters like Chapter 9 also need to be written.

January 22, 2025

The book is finally released.

Finally, we (Tom Rendon and Zach Stier) are excited to announce our long-awaited “Covid” book (what you do when you are by yourself with time on your hands) CREATIVITY IN YOUNG CHILDREN. We are really proud in this book to have unlocked some original concepts and ways to think about creativity and early education. The book has been published by Redleaf Press. It includes research, case studies, and practical information for early childhood professionals, librarians, and the like.

We are so grateful to everyone who helped through this experience. We are excited about the opportunities ahead. Our colleagues at Redleaf were so generous and enthusiastic about what we did. Finally, we can share it with everyone else.

For the past four or more years, we researched the importance of creativity in young children. I am excited to announce the release of our book, from Creativity in Young Children: What Science Tells us and Our Hearts Know.

We sent a copy to our good friend, Dr. Michael Abel, at the Institute for Human Development at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. We asked for his thoughts. Here is what he wrote to us: “This book is a must read for educators, social science professionals, and anyone interested in whole child development. The thorough consideration of creativity in young children offers practical methods for fostering creative thought and expression. The implications for early childhood pedagogy are remarkable.”

Along with being extraordinarily gracious, Mike brought to the surface something we had been thinking when writing the book: that understanding creativity is key to understanding child development. His last sentence haunted me: “the implications for early childhood pedagogy are remarkable.” We want so much for that to be true.

First, we believe there is a profound connection between child development and creativity. To begin with, the whole process of development (which to restate as an etymological sentence: to dis-envelope; to remove from the current package and put into another one; or as a string of synonyms: unwrap, unfurl, unveil; reveal the meaning of, explain (see https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=develop)) requires energy and movement and perhaps even purpose. In Chapter 4 we tell readers that that energy has a name, and it is called “life force” (or in French, elan vital). Child development is about how a whole child progresses, changes and evolves into the full adult. And always there is that paradox: is the child who the child is or is the child who the child will become. To put it plainly, a child develops through a force we want to call “creativity.”

If early childhood education is meant to be about supporting, aiding, midwifing children into their full potential, then understanding creativity must be central to that task. That is what this book is about, and perhaps why Mike thinks its implications are early childhood pedagogy (i.e., how we teach young children) are remarkable. Mike has so well captured what we thought we were doing in this book that he makes me wonder if we really fully explained and expounded on what those implications are. We don’t think so but perhaps it is a good start. This is why his remark is haunting.

In any event, we would love to hear what about your own teaching is confirmed and reinforced in the revelations we make about the book, and what is challenged. What changes do you want to make as a teacher or as a parent in how you engaged with young children as they are—as they inevitably will be—creative.