Think Like a 4-Year-Old
- awalker187
- Oct 10
- 6 min read
I’m a father of two young girls.
Which means I’m constantly fielding questions.
The average four-year-old British girl asks their mum 390 questions a day! *
A four-year-old girl asks more questions per hour than Keir Starmer faces in Prime Minister’s Questions.
They ask one question every two minutes.
That’s 105,120 questions a year.
It never ceases!
“We come out of the womb questioning.” - Deborah Meier **
A Creative Question
In 1932, the 23-year-old Harvard dropout Edwin Land set up a new business.
After spending a year sneaking into the labs at Columbia University, he’d developed a new and much cheaper polarising film.
Instead of carefully growing single large polarising crystals, he achieved the same effect using millions of aligned micron-sized crystals.
The new polarisers were soon widely adopted in sunglasses and scientific instruments and the business was a success.
A decade later Land was on vacation in Santa Fe taking photos of his family.
He had a young daughter, and she did what young girls do almost 400 hundred times a day: she asked a question.
He recounted, “My daughter, Jennifer, who was then 3, asked me why she could not see the picture I had just taken of her.” ***
Land was a talented scientist, entrepreneur and a keen photographer, but his three-year-old child had posed a question he’d never considered.
“As I walked around that charming town, I undertook the task of solving the puzzle she had set for me. Within the hour the camera, the film and the physical chemistry became so clear that with a great sense of excitement I hurried to the place where a friend was staying, to describe to him in detail a dry camera which would give a picture immediately after exposure.”
Four years later he demonstrated the Land Camera, the world’s first instant camera.
Edwin Land’s company was Polaroid.
With the release of the instant camera, it was now one of the hottest high-tech companies ever.
By the time he stepped back as CEO in 1980 the company's global revenues were $1.4 billion.
Every Child is an Artist
Children have evolved to ask questions.
The psychologist Paul Silvia says, “If babies didn’t have a strong drive for novelty, they wouldn’t learn as much, and that would make it less likely they’d survive. So interest - the desire to learn new things, to explore the world, to seek novelty, to be on the lookout for change and variety - it’s a basic drive.” ****
The results of all this novelty seeking and questioning is that children are amazingly creative.
Dr George Land (no relation to Edwin) was the man who in the 1960’s designed creativity tests that NASA used to select innovative engineers and scientists.
The tests he created were later used on 1,600 children between the ages of three and five.
He then tested the same children when they were 10 and again at the age of 15.
The youngest group were by far the most creative - they were creative geniuses!
The drop off in creativity to the 280,000 adults who have also been tested is stark.
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." - Pablo Picasso
As we get older we ask fewer and fewer questions.
The survey of British children showed that when a boy is nine they only ask 144 questions a day.
And by the time we’re adults we may just ask a handful.
As well as creativity falling as we age, it’s also been falling over time.
The professor of educational psychology KH Kim Professor tracked falling trends in outbox thinking (fluid and original thinking) in America.
Americans now generate fewer unique solutions to open-ended problems.
Other creativity traits have also dropped including; open-mindedness (being open to new experiences, new people and differing view points), fluidity (adapting to new situations, solving novel problems, and thinking abstractly without relying on previously learned knowledge), elaboration (thinking in detail, build upon existing ideas, and expand on concepts to make them more comprehensive), and originality.
We Stop Asking Questions
Professor KH Kim believes that the growth of high stakes testing in schools and universities is largely responsible for the fall in creativity over time.
Children are increasingly preparing for tests rather than learning how to think, stifling our natural curiosity.
High-stakes testing teaches students to avoid taking risks for fear of being wrong, which damages creativity which involves being willing to fail.
“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.” - Dr Edwin Land
Professor of arts education Sir Ken Robinson shared KH Kim’s concerns.
“Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know they’ll have a go. They’re not frightened of being wrong.”
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original. And by the time we get to be adults most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatise mistakes. We now run National Education Systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. The result is we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
The psychologist Carol Dweck introduced the concepts of fixed and growth mindsets.
Growth mindset: People who believe that intelligence, abilities, and talents can be learned and improved. They embrace failure as a chance to learn.
Fixed mindset: People who believe the same traits as permanent and unchangeable. They fear failure.
Children start out with a growth mindset.
You see it when children work relentlessly through the challenges of learning to walk, ride a bike, or like my eldest daughter, practicing monkey bars until her hands are calloused like a lumberjack.
But gradually fixed mindsets can come in, as we build a fear of failure and shame, and the brain looks for the comfort of the known.
We stop asking questions, seeking novelty and thinking creatively.
“We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather we get educated out of it.” - Sir Ken Robinson
Activating Your Beginner's Mind
The good news is that thinking creativity can be cultivated, or more accurately - relearned.
Dr. George Land outlines two types of thinking involved in creativity:
Convergent thinking: where you consciously judge, vet, criticise, refine, combine and improve your ideas.
Divergent thinking: where you, often subconsciously, imagine original ideas which may be rough to start with.
Children think divergently and adults think largely convergently - it’s what we’re taught throughout our schooling.
But we can actively engage divergent thinking.
"The most creative people have this childlike facility to play." - John Cleese
Shoshin is a Zen Buddhism term for the beginner's mind.
It’s an attitude of openness, and lack of preconceptions, at any experience level, and allowing ourselves to think like a beginner.
The book that popularised it was Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryū Suzuki who noted, "in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few."
To test the beginner's mindset, the psychologists Darya Zabelin and Michael Robinson tested the creativity of two groups of university students.
They asked them to describe that they would do, think, and feel if school was cancelled for the day.
The only difference was that one group was asked to think like seven-year-olds.
The people who thought with a childlike mindset produced more and better original ideas.
They found that people who had growth mindsets produced more original responses than those with fixed mindsets, but both improved when ‘thinking young’.
Introverts, who are the most inhibited with the fear of failure, improved their creativity significantly by engaging spontaneity.
By switching their mindset, they lost the fear of failure, engaged divergent thinking and they were able to be even more creative than the extroverts.
So if you need to be creative, you have to change your mindset for the task.
Start asking questions (lots of them), think divergently, have an open growth mindset, do not be afraid to fail, and start thinking like a child again.
“By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.” - Alan Watts
* “Mothers asked nearly 300 questions a day, study finds,” The Telegraph (2013)
** Warren Berger, “A More Beautiful Question”, Bloomsbury Publishing (2014)
*** A Genius And His Magic Camera,” Life Magazine (1972)
**** Angela Duckworth interview with Paul Silvia in her book Grit, Vermillion (2016)
