The Having of Wonderful Ideas

Here's why we should let kids do it wrong.

Welcome! I’m Lisa Sibbett and this is The Auntie Bulletin, a newsletter for people who are significantly involved in helping to raise other people’s children. 

The most recent Auntie Bulletin essay, “On Befriending Kids,” seems to have struck a chord, because we have a TON of new subscribers this week. I’m so very glad you’re here! 

To learn what this newsletter is all about, here’s a great place to start. And you can read my full (small, but growing) archive here. 

Also, if you haven’t already, please take a moment to complete the Auntie Bulletin Reader Survey. Your response helps me tailor this newsletter to your interests and needs. If you only respond to the multiple choice questions (which is great), it’ll take less than 2 minutes to complete. If you’d like to elaborate on your answers (which is also great), it’ll take as long as it takes, but probably less than 10 minutes.

If you appreciate reading this newsletter, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5 a month or $50 for the year. You can also support my work by “liking” this post below. It only requires a click on the little heart icon, and it helps other people find my Substack.

Has This Ever Happened to You?

You and a small friend are heading out the door to the playground when you notice the kid has her boots on the wrong feet. What do you do?

A. Help her switch her boots

B. Let it ride

Adults who spend time with kids frequently encounter decision points like this. At first blush, the choice seems insignificant, but scratch the surface and a jumble of competing needs and priorities become apparent. There are our own adult needs – perhaps for expediency, or order, or to be perceived by others as a competent carer. There are the child’s needs – to learn to navigate the world and to function in society, but also to do things their own way and to make independent choices. 

Informed by a PhD in Education and a lifetime of experience with kids, I’ve formed strong opinions on the boot question and others like it. But before I weigh in, let me predict a likely outcome for each of the two options I’ve offered you above. 

Say you choose option A. The kid has her boots on the wrong feet, and you tell her so, and she switches them. No boot-related mishaps occur on the way to the playground, and you arrive unscathed. 

Now imagine you choose option B. You observe the kid’s reversed boots and decide to let it go. Maybe you say something but she declines to switch the boots back, and you’re like, “you do you, kiddo.” On the way to the playground, the kid races ahead. Puffing along behind, you shout, “You are fast as the wind! Stop at the corner!” And that’s when the child trips over her reversed boots and crashes to the sidewalk. Tears. You gather her into your lap on a nearby step and let her cry for a bit. She’s got a few scrapes and bruises but she’s okay. You say, “If you put your boots on the right feet you might be less likely to fall. Do you want to switch them?” She nods, boots are switched. Onward to the playground.

Aunties, even though Option A is more expedient, I’m on Team B, tears and all. I choose the “let it ride” option when it comes to allowing reversed boots and many other such happenstances: children’s mispronunciations, their creative spellings, their reliance on guesswork and memorization when learning to read, a count to twenty that misses fifteen. Surprising clothing choices. Toys repurposed as tools and tools repurposed as toys. Doing things the hard way. Doing things the long way. Doing things the wrong way. You’ll rarely witness me correcting or redirecting any of these. (Although I will discuss a few exceptions in a bit).

Today I’m going to tell you why I believe in letting kids do things “the wrong way,” and how you can help nourish the incredible intellectual creativity that children bring with them into this world.

The Having of Wonderful Ideas

I first became interested in making space for kids’ daily experimentation many years ago, when I read developmental psychologist Eleanor Duckworth’s 1987 book The Having of Wonderful Ideas. Duckworth explained that humans are natural experimenters when we’re young, but as we age, grownups dismiss our divergent ideas as trivial or reject them as unacceptable. Adults, she observed, are scared of being wrong; we thus avoid exploring alternative ways of thinking and behavior and also discourage such explorations in children.

It may be tempting to think we’ve come a long way since 1987, but consider Duckworth’s example of a child learning his letters. 

He has happily learned the shape of a C… and draws it – but backward. “No!” he’s told, “That’s not a C; a C is like this.” An hour later, in another exercise dealing with shapes, he is expected to realize that a square is still a square when it’s sitting on its point looking like a diamond! How can he make sense out of all of that? A backwards C looks much more like itself than does a square sitting on its point. He is meant to be intelligent when he deals with squares, moving them around and looking at them in all sorts of ways, but is severely restrained from being intelligent in dealing with letters.

Even in learning conventions, “right ways,” why not give children the chance to be intelligent? With letters, that would seem to be as simple as encouraging them to explore their shapes – “Yes, you’re right, that’s a C” (a C would still be a C even if it’s lying on its back).

Even when adults are committed to encouraging divergent thinking in domains like art or storytelling, it can be hard to recognize how we are disciplining and domesticating children’s “wonderful ideas” in the myriad situations of life where we assume there’s a right answer. We know which way C’s and D’s and E’s are supposed to point. We’re sure which boot is supposed to go on which foot.

And yet, as Duckworth explains, “Of all the virtues related to intellectual functioning, the most passive is the virtue of knowing the right answer. Knowing the right answer requires no decisions, carries no risks, and makes no demands. It is automatic. It is thoughtless.” Indeed, she argues, “knowing the right answer is overrated.”

Excellent title, excellent cover. And the receipt was still in the back! Apparently I bought my copy at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, OR in June 2009.

Better to encourage surprise, puzzlement, struggle, excitement, honest attempts, anticipation, and earned realizations which are gradually and then confidently arrived at. Even “wrong outcomes,” Duckworth writes, are “legitimate and important elements of learning.” 

Let me give you one more example from The Having of Wonderful Ideas, and then I’ll turn to how we might apply these insights with the kids in our own lives. Duckworth writes of an elementary school class in Montreal who are having a spelling lesson. (They’re learning in French, which fortunately has more regular spelling conventions than English). It’s time to spell cousin (same meaning as in English, but the French word is pronounced differently). The class breaks the word into its component sounds: K-OO-Z-IN. 

The teacher then presents all possible ways of spelling each of those sounds: C or K; OU or OO; S or Z; EIN, AIN, or IN…. The children proceed to produce all ways of spelling the word. “Yes, that’s one way. Any more?” The more ways they get, the better. They write them on the board, and if a child has a way that is not yet on the board, he or she adds it to what is there. When all the possible ways have been produced, the teacher tells them the way that is conventionally used.

Note that instead of feeling stupid for creating an unconventional spelling, the children feel clever. And they know that whoever may be dumb, in making spelling such an arbitrary exercise, it’s not they! They also know, just as well as any other child, that there’s only one correct way to write any given word, and this way is underlined in their notebooks, among all the possible ways. Moreover, as time goes on they develop greater and greater ability to guess, for themselves, which is likely to be the conventional way.

These children, Duckworth observes, “learn to spell by not by avoiding wrong spellings in a panic, but by actively seeking out every possible wrong spelling.”

The Having of Wonderful Ideas is what first got me thinking explicitly about humans’ deep and innate capacity to learn through trial and error – from infants’ first attempts to grab at a hanging mobile, to whatever Nobel Prize winners are doing when they figure out how to develop mRNA vaccines. When kids are encouraged to have and explore wonderful ideas – even or especially when these ideas seem “wrong” to our domesticated adult minds – they get to exercise the intellectual creativity that is their birthright.

So, what can Aunties be practicing when we hang out with kids? Here are some practical suggestions that you can try anytime.

Assume Competence

Although a child’s divergent idea might seem strange, from their perspective the idea often makes perfect sense. Wearing boots on the wrong feet can feel interesting and novel to a child. Not only that, but it turns out that navigating uneven surfaces is an important developmental stage in learning to walk and run. By putting their boots on the wrong feet, feeling what that’s like, and then deciding to stick with it, little kids are actually challenging their feet and ankles and legs to deal with a higher-demand walking task that allows them to develop strength, agility, and balance. From this perspective, wearing boots on the wrong feet is a toddler’s enactment of embodied wisdom.

Duckworth writes of a third grade class who have just read a picture book about an alien invasion, and now they’re discussing whether there really is life in outer space. A kid asks, seemingly apropos of nothing, “Does all water have germs in it?” The teacher is puzzled, but rather than dismiss the child’s question as off-topic, she asks follow-up questions to ascertain what he’s getting at. Duckworth shares what the teacher figured out:

He “knew” from some authoritative source that there was ice on Mars. He also “knew” that when the sun shone on that ice, it would melt, at least somewhat. That would mean there was water on Mars; and if all water had germs in it, then there would be germs in that water on Mars, and since germs are alive, that would mean there was life in outer space.

Duckworth’s book was published in 1987, so this exchange happened sometime before that. Here we have an eight-year-old anticipating what, in the 21st century, has become an intriguing line of investigation for NASA. Contrary to appearances, this kid wasn’t lobbing some random non sequitur into a class discussion; he was being downright brilliant.

When a kid ventures a weird idea or strange approach to a challenge, we Aunties can practice pausing before we decide they’re doing it wrong. We can ask ourselves, “what else might be going on here?” And then like the teacher in the third grade classroom, we can start asking questions to see if we can better understand.¹

Join In

There’s a lot of potential for creativity and comedy if you let yourself participate in a kid’s wonderful idea. What if you also tried your boots on the wrong feet on the way to the playground? I haven’t done this (but now I might). I can imagine this leading to some terrific conversation. You could each talk about what it feels like, and think aloud about what could go wrong, what’s fun about it, who you’re going to tell about it later, and what their astonished reactions will be.

Or consider that you could be the person who starts experimenting, in partnership with a kid, with all the different ways the letter C can face. You could investigate which letters can point two ways or three or four or more ways (maybe you’ll notice together that a sideways N looks like a Z, and who knows what else), and you can check if there are any letters that look the same no matter which way you draw them (you’ll arrive at X and O eventually). The kid will get to practice letter-forming motor skills – which is important, ask a kindergarten teacher! She’ll also get a healthy dose of affirmation that playing around and trying weird things is a legitimate thing to do, even for a grownup. You’ll probably both have fun. And you can send a photo of the results and a note about your activities to Eleanor Duckworth. Look, her email address is listed on her faculty page at Harvard!²

Despite their propensity for divergent thinking, kids can also be real sticklers once they’ve decided they know the right answer. You can surprise and delight them by “getting it wrong” yourself. Insist – with a big grin on your face – that you’re pretty sure a cow says “quack” and watch them delight in judging you for your ignorance. Since kids are assumed to be incompetent all the time, they often experience joyful schadenfreude when the tables are turned.

Save Your Corrections For When It Matters

Now, improv comedy is not my area of expertise, but it’s my understanding that “yes, and” is a cornerstone principle. The idea is that an improviser will accept whatever is introduced into the scene, and then they’ll build on it. Encouraging wonderful ideas operates on the same principle – after all, running with kids’ divergent thinking is really a form of practical everyday improv.

That said, there are a few situations in which I shift from a “yes, and” approach to simply correcting what the kid is doing.

1. Avoiding danger. To be honest I’m not too worried about a fall on the sidewalk, but I don’t want a kid falling from a high tree branch, burning herself on a hot stove, or crossing the street without looking both ways. 

2. Preventing destruction of valued items. This requires discerning what is genuinely valuable. With other people’s property, I err on the side of caution. We’re not going to try to stand on someone’s lawn gnome or take apart a parent’s TV to see how it works. With my own property – which for the most part I value very highly! – I sometimes just need to a do a quick check with myself. Does it really matter if this baby unspools a whole roll of toilet paper? Maybe not. Do I want her rubbing yogurt all over her body, and in the process also all over my favorite cashmere sweater? Aunties, I do not. 

3. Showing kindness and respect to others. While I’m happy to dilly-dally my way to the playground if nobody’s waiting on us, if a younger sibling needs to be picked up from daycare I’m going to honor the daycare teachers’ time and prioritize not being late. If a child is calling another kid a stupid dummy or picking the neighbors’ tulips, I’m going to put a stop to it.

Should I tell her that her hiding place sucks?

Assume They’ll Learn “the Right Answer” Eventually

Adults sometimes assume that if we don’t correct kids’ wrong ideas, they’ll never learn. We need to tell them the right way to spell words or they’ll never be able to write properly and they’ll lack all credibility and they’ll never get a decent job and they’ll have a terrible life. It may sound a little preposterous when I lay it all out like that, but in fact these kinds of probably-exaggerated fears plague parents and Aunties all the time (myself included). It comes from a deep and genuine desire to see the kids we love thrive. And yet the reality is that, between school, spellcheck, and social pressure, kids do usually wind up learning reading and spelling and socially acceptable forms of dress for their peer group. 

Last week, someone commented on my “On Befriending Kids” post that if we don’t require kids to make polite conversation, they’ll never learn this valuable skill. I disagree. When we meet kids where they’re at with any given skill – be it dressing, writing, or conversing – we give them the building blocks to experiment, take risks, tackle increasingly complex tasks, and transfer their skills to novel contexts. Educators call the work of helping learners build from easier to harder tasks scaffolding, and it’s an absolute cornerstone of research-based best-practices for supporting human learning at any age. 

Ensuring that kids “get it right” can feel particularly high stakes in communities whose competence is routinely called into question. I’m talking in particular about communities of color, immigrant and multilingual communities, communities where there’s a lot of poverty. I’m talking about kids with disabilities, and kids who are queer or gender-nonconforming. I’m talking about girls in STEM. There’s a totally understandable line of reasoning here that children and families who are constantly underestimated, whose competence is continually called into question, need to learn the rules of the game as quickly as possible in order to keep themselves safe and be treated with respect. 

And yet, in many cases, letting kids get things wrong and learn through experimentation can actually support, rather than impede, their ability to demonstrate their competence. Because they have learned more deeply than children who are simply told the right answer, kids whose wonderful ideas have been encouraged are capable of transferring their know-how to novel situations and making leaps of reasoning that many educators and employers respect and seek out. Thinking creatively and taking intellectual risks are actually a means to enact and claim power in our society; these skills may open doors that rote memorization of the “right answers” never will. 

American schools are actually in the midst of a decades-long realignment around what counts as valuable knowledge. This is partly about whose knowledge and experiences are highlighted, as more and more schools replace their predominantly Caucasian and European literature curriculum, for example, with novels, stories, plays, poetry, and nonfiction produced by diverse writers from around the world. Equally profoundly, the field of education has increasingly shifted from a model of learning that depends on rote memorization to a model that relies, in Duckworthian fashion, on genuine inquiry into how things work. This is apparent, for example, in the Next Generation Science Standards, a set of K-12 science standards that emphasize skills like asking questions, developing models, carrying out investigations, and constructing explanations.

Encouraging wonderful ideas isn’t just about teaching kids to play the game and succeed in a society that is broken and unjust. It’s also about supporting young people to question the rules, to challenge how the game itself is played. The economic structure in the United States today depends on the existence of a large population of poor and working class people who don’t cause trouble and don’t step out of line. When the most vulnerable members of our society are expected to accept the status quo and comply, part of wielding power is an ability to ask questions and challenge the way things have always been done.

Kids’ Wonderful Ideas Can Spread

A few years back, a young friend and I went through a phase of drawing from life. We looked at flowers, closely observed their details, and tried to capture those details using smelly markers on printer paper.

The fruits (flowers?) of our labors

One day we thought we’d draw some fruit, so I grabbed a banana from the bowl to copy how it looked. My young friend looked at me, looked at the banana, and sighed. Then she lovingly encouraged me to set myself free of the tyranny of real-life models, and just draw the picture in my mind. She got up and she put the banana away. And then somehow she was composing a long opera entitled “Imperfect is Perfect,” which she improvised at top volume while we drew. 

Aunties, it was a good life lesson for me and I haven’t forgotten it. (Actually I forget it all the time, but I’m trying).

There’s a lot at stake in the having of wonderful ideas. Kids benefit. Adults benefit. And I believe society benefits, too. Instead of believing that there’s one right answer or one right way, people who practice having wonderful ideas also learn that there are lots of possible right ways, including ones that haven’t been thought of yet. When we try on different possibilities – boots one way, now boots the other – we learn the ability to change our minds in response to new evidence, and we develop the ability to change track when our current plan isn’t serving us anymore.

Our rigid beliefs about right and wrong aren’t serving our society well these days. As a nation, we’re terrible at changing our minds in response to evidence – and I’m not just talking about right-wing election deniers and anti-vaxxers. Research suggests that political liberals are just as likely as political conservatives to resist factual information if it threatens their values. And it’s evident that our nation’s current trajectory is failing many of us. Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming presidential election, it’s not clear that meaningful action will be taken on climate change, that childcare will get more affordable and accessible anytime soon, that regulations will be put in place to limit people’s access to automatic weapons, or that the United States will stop funding the massacre of our allies’ political enemies. We need a better way forward.

Weirdly, I think letting a kid wear her boots on the wrong feet is a small but meaningful part of how we get there.

Three Recommended Reads

One. How to Build a Village

At her newsletter What We Do Now That We’re Here, Rosie Spinks offers this truly awesome compilation of her own community-building advice as well as advice from her clearly very wise and engaged readers. Read the whole thing. There are so many wonderful suggestions and anecdotes here, including one from a formerly-depressed parent who started volunteering at her kids’ preschool and felt her mental health improve by leaps and bounds. 

Behold how Rosie is thinking about wonderful ideas, just like we are!

Most of these recommendations go against the grain of modern life. Doing them may involve some discomfort, or require you to do something that seems a little weird or intrusive at first, or even run the risk of overstepping a social/cultural norm or boundary.

I think that risk is worth it. Remember that a lot of what we’re trying to counteract here is what Esther Perel called “social atrophy.” I now see my own discomfort in these moments in a different light: A sign that I am on the right path. That I am actively building a muscle and trying to model a kind of behavior that so many humans would be better off for engaging in. My mistake before was thinking this should feel easy and natural – it’s not!

Two. There’s a Place for Everyone

I just came across Adam Mastroianni’s newsletter Experimental History, and although I haven’t dug through his archives yet, I sure am looking forward to that on the strength of this post, “There’s a Place for Everyone.” It’s wise, heartful, and very funny, though it took me a couple minutes to recognize the jokes. I think that’s often a sign of something pretty great going on – when at first you don’t quite get what you’re experiencing, and then slowly you’re like, “wait – I think this is… completely awesome?”

Mastroianni’s argument in this essay is that there’s a weird and often important niche for every single human, and yet these can be hard to find because we’re bad at noticing the needs and opportunities in our immediate vicinity. 

The globalization of attention is a damn shame for many reasons, and the biggest is that it leaves lots of local niches neglected. If everyone’s trying to be an Instagram relationship advice influencer, nobody’s trying to be their friendly neighborhood Breakup Whisperer. Plus, everybody, no matter how much of a nobody they are, has at least a few people who are counting on them, whose lives they can ruin or enrich, and it’s hard to do much enriching when you’re fretting full-time about who’s gonna be the next president.

Local niches are important because they can pack a lot of meaning into a tiny space; they make it so that more people can matter.

Three. We Are Not Drowning, We Are Fighting

If you want to know more about how educators are redefining whose knowledge counts as valuable, you’d do well to check out Rethinking Schools. In “Because Our Islands Are Our Life,” teacher Moé Yonamine describes how high school students in her school’s Pacific Island Club used poetry to highlight the experiences of frontline communities in the struggle for climate justice. The kids use the refrain “1.5!” to demand the world adhere to a target of no more than 1.5° C of warming.

Through the course of the afternoon, wrapped up in an unbearably hot classroom with 11 fans blowing, climate change was the joke of the day as students sat uncomfortably. Despite the heat, students were eager to understand climate change, to be educated about fighters who look like them, and to joyfully connect across stories and laughter of island culture.

At the end of the afternoon, Kathy turned to the board and wrote, “1.5 because . . .” And from there, each student wrote — some about memories of being home, a few telling about sacred grandparents and family members they left behind and others addressing the pain, the fight, and the determination of rising up together. Threading the poem together in one collective voice, everyone agreed that this was the piece they had to do together at the Unity Fest as PI Club — to show up for their communities and home islands symbolically as one.

And Now, the Cute Kid Video of the Week

These kids are just the literal best. I wonder what was going through the mind of the guy doing the digging?

Nothing Sold, Bought, or Processed

The Auntie Bulletin is an ad-free publication that will never try to sell you anything and receives no money from affiliate links. I can only offer it if readers like you voluntarily make modest donations to keep the lights on. This newsletter does not have a paywall, and I’d like to keep it that way. I ask that if you appreciate what you read here, you take a few seconds right now to become a paid subscriber. It’s affordable at only $5 a month, and it allows everyone to be able to access The Auntie Bulletin, regardless of their income.

1. Here’s a cute list of kids’ “mistakes” which, on examination, mostly make perfect sense. Here’s my fave: “As we drove across the overpass each day, I would point out the different directions to my kids, explaining ‘That way takes you to Daddy’s shop,’ ‘This way takes you to the store,’ and ‘The other way goes to Miami.’ A few days later we were in the car and my son pointed at one of the off-ramps and proudly said, ‘That way goes to mommy’s-ami!'”

2.  If you actually do this and let me know about it I will be so stoked, and with your permission I will totally write about it in The Auntie Bulletin.