Webster’s defines safari as “the caravan and equipment of a hunting expedition especially in Eastern Africa.”

But it is also defined as a “journey or expedition.”

For the purposes of family fun, we will go with definition number two.

However, there are a few added elements to a family safari. You must have:

1.  A direction

2.  A camera

3.  A beverage of choice for each participant

4.  An attitude of discovery and adventure

Get ready for a family fun adventure!

A safari doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars and start with malaria shots and updated passports. You have a safari just outside your front door.

In our family, we have a special definition of “safari,” and if your family chooses to adopt it, we promise you will have tons of fun and make some etched memories that will last a lifetime. Family fun can be hard to come by as kids get older and schedules take over the calendar. But the kind of safari we are talking about can be squeezed in between swim practice and a birthday party, or a trip to the dentist and a visit to the grandparents.

Want an excuse to connect with your kids of all ages? Grab your best hat and let’s go.

The safari starts in your driveway.

Load up all your people and whatever you need for a day (or several hours if that is what you have available). Make sure someone has a camera to capture the moments and surprises. If your children have phones or electronic devices, leave them at home. This may cause irritation at first, but once you get going, they will get over it. The point is to be together and in the moment, not perfecting the photos for an Instagram post.

First stop is your favorite watering hole (or drive through) to make sure everyone has a beverage. Choose a direction. This should not be cause for a family feud. You can simply elect one person, perhaps the youngest, to choose north, south, east, or west. For advanced safari-goers, you may also choose double directions like northwest or southeast. Then your trusted safari leader, AKA driver, finds the closest road headed in that direction, and you’re off.

There are two keys to a successful safari.

1st- Only the navigator is allowed to use an electronic device, and this should be done sparingly if at all. Once you have chosen a direction, it is ok to get lost or just continue heading in that direction until time to come home. Searching for directions home is totally allowed, and even encouraged if you have a set deadline to be back to civilization.

2nd-  You must stop at every interesting opportunity, no matter how odd or simple it may seem. That strange store with the Godzilla statue out front, perfect photo opp. The restaurant with the parking lot full of pickup trucks, a must. The big field of cotton or soybeans or sunflowers you just want to grab a closer look at, yes. If there is one of those antique malls with stalls of fabulous junk, give each person a small amount of money and a time limit and see who can purchase the most interesting item.

This is a great chance to teach your children some fun ‘old school’ car games.

Fun games like license plate bingo, who has the most cows or horses on their side of the road, the ABC’s of the roadway, or other things you remember arguing with your siblings about from the backseat (with no seatbelt of course). Questions like, “What animal would you be and why?” or “If you could have any famous person to dinner, who would you invite and what would you serve?” can be fun ways to kick off interesting conversations. Here are some more from Parents.com you could even print to take with you.

In an age where it is harder and harder to carve out time to just be together as a family, a safari is an oasis for some family bonding and laughter1st-

How do you motivate your child to be creative?

When your children are still young, what are some things you can do to encourage them to enjoy childhood and utilize their creativity instead of turning to a device to provide all their entertainment?

First, naturally limit use of electronic devices to fill times of boredom.

A quick Google search of “the value of boredom” revealed:

• How Being Bored Out of Your Mind Makes You More Creative,
• The Surprising Benefits of Boredom, and
• The Scientific Benefits of Being Bored.

Why is it that we have lost the love of boredom? Where do good ideas come from? Being bored. Making sure that we don’t hand our child a device or allow them to flip on the television or computer every time they claim “I’m bored,” is a huge step toward helping them develop skills that allow them to seek alternatives to electronics.

Setting up stations or areas where your child can go when they are bored, can encourage creative play

A Dress-Up Station

Fill a bin with open-ended dress-up ideas.  Old clothes from your closet, Grandma’s or Goodwill is a great start. Look for Halloween costumes on sale in the winter. Scarves, costume jewelry, and even large fabric remnants can inspire your little one to get into character and go on adventures.  Accessories such as shoes and sunglasses also add a fun touch. Don’t forget a mirror so they can see how great they look. Dress-up can result in hours of pretending, dance events, and creative character play.

A Building Station

A tub with building supplies provides an opportunity for trial and error and figuring out the best way to create a project. Of course, Legos are great but so are other building materials. A visit to a construction site dumpster (with permission) or the local home improvement store can yield endless pieces for modular play. Various size pieces of PVC pipe and fittings, boards (remove any nails or splinters), and other building materials make for fort building paradise. Add a few sheets from a yard sale and your children may want to spend the night in their new creation.

An Arts & Crafts Station

Another storage tub could be dedicated to arts and crafts supplies. Stock up when school supplies are plentiful and add paints and paint brushes, fabric scraps and embroidery thread, glue and some construction paper, old magazines, and a couple of T-shirt’ for smocks.  Your artistic child will be content for hours creating a masterpiece for your fridge.

As with any activity for young children, you will need to set parameters on where they can spread out their creative supplies and how they will need to clean them up and return them to the storage tub. Eventually they will be able to independently choose activities, rather than always going to a device for entertainment.

By offering this unstructured time, think of the opportunities you are providing for your child.  They are practicing skills that use creativity, imagination, and innovation. So next time your youngster starts to whine, instead of handing over the iPad, reach for an activity tub to inspire them

“The brain can be developed just as a set of muscles.” ~Thomas Edison

I want to ask you to suspend your belief that “creativity is inherited”. In fact, creativity is inherent in every human being. As parents, YOU can nurture and strengthen your children’s creative abilities.

Your children have enormous mental capacity stored within the right hemisphere of their minds that can become weaker as they spend less time engaged in creative activity. Imaginative play is replaced with TV and video games. Coloring and drawing are replaced with writing and mathematics. The pressure to perform on standardized tests replaces “circle time.” School becomes more about memorizing facts and figures and less about independent thinking.

Without an awareness of the importance of developing the creative, right brain skills, your young children can depart from their innate creative selves into logical, linear thinking, left-brain-dominant “mature” individuals.

Whereas creatively empowered individuals say, “We can make this work!” others may say, “It has never been done before.” It is exactly this disparity that fueled a recent cover story (July 2010) in Newsweek Magazine entitled “The Creativity Crisis”. It reported decisively that our children’s creativity scores (based on a creativity test similar in intention to the IQ test) have been steadily DROPPING since 1990. With all of the challenges facing our world today and our children being the future source of potential solutions to these problems, it is now more important than ever to pay special attention to balancing our children’s education to include creative activity.

What can you do to ensure your kids grow into “creatively fit” adults? Here are three simple steps. Learn more at www.creativelyfit.com.

1. Provide unstructured playtime. Resist the temptation to have every day booked full of activity. Kids need the “blank canvas” time in their day where it is entirely up to them to CREATE their acitivity.
2. Shop for art supplies at the grocery store. You don’t need fancy art supplies or a home studio to use creative art activity to fuel your child’s creative mind. Simply keep blank paper in the kitchen (because, let’s face it, that is where they live), crayons, fresh markers, a glue stick, etc.
3. Get outside! Nothing serves as a greater source of inspiration than the great outdoors. The kids may resist at first, but take them to the park, the nature reserve, or even send them to the driveway with some sidewalk chalk. It is the simple activities that will have the most impact.

To learn all “33 Things” you can do to raise creative kids, buy Whitney Ferre’s book 33 Things to Know About Raising Creative Kids.

We Americans pride ourselves on our creativity. We celebrate people like Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and George Lucas. We imagine that while our school children may not be at the top of the world’s test-takers, we and our kids shine when it comes to thinking out of the box. We think we love creativity.

Except that we don’t.

One study explains this. Researchers from Cornell University found that people hate uncertainty. They  tend to go with the sure thing of a practical, tried-and-true idea instead of taking a chance on a brand new thought. They not only eject creative ideas in their own heads, squelching their own best ideas, but they reject new ideas from others too. Creativity is just too risky.

Another study found that elementary school teachers are like the rest of us: their favorite students are the least creative ones. Teachers have a lot going on during the day, and the kids who sit still, do as they’re told, and don’t ask too many questions are simplest to deal with. Unfortunately, the creative children are too often silenced to make enough time to complete the never-ending checklist from the curriculum. These imaginative children can also be actively disliked with all of the pressures a teacher is facing. Sacrificing creativity to “teach to the test” and produce top data, unfortunately, limits the time to foster original thinkers.

This is an obvious problem if you’ve ever looked at a preschool child. Little kids are bundles of creative energy. They ask questions, they fiddle with things, they try things out just to see what happens. Come kindergarten, much of this is not valued. The very properties that make children children are discouraged in school. When we wonder why children don’t like school very much or say their favorite parts of the day are lunch and recess, here is the reason why. Kids’ own true selves are left at the schoolhouse door. Neglected and undernourished, these true selves eventually fade away.

So what can you do? How do you keep your child’s creativity alive?

1. Don’t completely count on the schools. School is great and it’s necessary, but it doesn’t always nurture your child’s creativity to their capacity.
2. At the same time, look for the best school you can. This doesn’t necessarily mean finding a private school but it does mean evaluating the schools available to you and choosing one that is least controlling and most child-centered. Forget about back to basics and zero tolerance. Look for fun along with learning.
3. At home, give your child space. Thomas Edison’s mother cleared a spot in the basement for young Tom to fool around with tools. Set up a table in a corner with some boxes for equipment and materials, cardboard underneath to protect the floor, good lighting and a comfortable chair. Let it get messy. Creativity is not neat.
4. Give your child time. New ideas bubble up when the mind is relaxed and open to the bubbles. This means every kid needs some downtime, time to be bored, time to just play around and see what happens. Not every moment of a child’s life should be purposeful in a way that looks purposeful to a grown up.
5. Be open to ideas. They come from everywhere. Instead of taking your child to the same old places, wander through an antique store or second-hand shop. Spend some time at the hardware store, just seeing what’s there. If you are lucky enough to be close to a science surplus store or salvage shop, poke around with your kid. Just free-associate. What comes to mind?
6. Embrace the risk. If we reject creativity because it makes us nervous, we have to become more comfortable with feeling anxious. Your child will think of things you never, ever could have. Your first reaction might be to make her stop. Try to stifle that reaction. Say, “yes.”

Our future as a nation comes from the having of amazing ideas. Those ideas have to come from somewhere and from somebody. Your child could be one of those somebodies but only if you keep his creativity alive.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

Last winter an amusing story on social media described how people under threat of yet another snow storm this winter cleared out the shelves of a local supermarket of everything from avocados to orange soda. The impulse to buy things – anything – as a solution to a problem was revealed by this nonsensical behavior.  The author suggested that another quality than panic would be more helpful in a crisis. That quality he said is resourcefulness.dad is resourceful;  as a child of the Great Depression he learned early how to make what he needed or adapt one thing to work in a new situation. But people today aren’t resourceful, are they? Is resourcefulness still useful?

The television show McGyver built its entire premise on resourcefulness. Survivorman, Mythbusters, and other popular programs, including the new Thingamabob, revolve around making what one needs or building something new from what’s on hand. Numerous televised cooking challenges follow this same format. Clearly, being resourceful is still valued, at least as entertainment.

The resourceful person has a huge advantage over the rest of us. Someone who is resourceful is never at a loss. He can always come up with a solution. He exercises his creativity, solves problems, and gets what he needs without relying on someone else to invent, market and sell it to him for a price. The resourceful person has a skill that never goes away but it always ready to make life better.

Why wouldn’t anyone want their child to be more resourceful? It sounds like a wonderful thing!

So how can you help your child be more resourceful?

1. Stop giving her everything she asks for. Ask her how she can make do, figure out a work-around, or invent her own solution. And when she does, applaud her effort.
2. Model resourcefulness. Instead of running to the grocery store at the last minute, figure out how to cook what’s already in the fridge. Instead of buying something, use what you already have.
3. Make your own fun. Instead of always purchasing fun, in the form of admission tickets, sports equipment, and lessons, figure out how to have a good time without spending a dime. Boredom is an invitation to get creative, not to buy happiness.
4. Notice the resourcefulness of others. Countless stories have emerged in this snowiest of winters about people who made do and helped others by using their wits. Knowing how others stood up to a challenge is inspiration for the next time you have to do the same.

The child who is resourceful has a strength that can’t be bought. It’s a gift that grows with practice. Help your child be ready for whatever life has in store.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

Considering how much parents like a nap when they can get one, it’s funny how eager children are to give them up. Toddlers who clearly are running on empty resist falling asleep and defiantly declare that they are not tired at all.

It’s not unusual for children as young as 18 months or two years to seem to want to give up all naps. Don’t be fooled. Children up to three years old need 12 or 14 hours of sleep in every 24 hours. It’s unlikely your little person is getting all of that at night. When you get resistance to napping from a toddler, just switch up your napping routine a bit but don’t quit the nap.

Kids used to nap more than they do now. In the 1950’s and 60’s, kindergartens (which met for only half a day) always included naptime. Today, even Head Start programs for three-year-olds have deleted the nap. Part of this can be attributed to the hectic pace of modern life, with something going on every minute. The boredom that used to send young kids to bed each afternoon just doesn’t exist anymore. And part of the lack of napping can be attributed to lack of insistence on napping. Where once preschoolers were sent to their beds for an hour each day at 3:00, whether they were tired or not, now parents hesitate to impose such an arbitrary requirement. Parents also are reluctant to commit themselves to being home each day in time for nap.

But there’s nothing wrong with imposing a nap requirement and there’s a lot to be said for some downtime during the day. If you want to make a nap part of your child’s daily routine or if you think he needs it, then simply plan for it. Clear your schedule each day so a nap can happen; at the designated hour, pull down the shades, turn down the radio and your cell phone, and let everyone rest. Older kids (and you) might not sleep but might spend this time reading, though there’s nothing that says they can’t sleep.

Preschool children who nap regularly will need to wean themselves away from this delightful habit in time to attend full-time school. And at that point, the child’s bedtime may need to be adjusted to add in the sleep that used to be got during naptime. By the same token, children who have trouble getting to sleep at night may not need their naps and should be kept active in the afternoon.

Downtime of some sort is good for everyone. One of the criteria for creativity, after all, is time to think. We all need a bit of a break in order to be at our very best. So instead of rushing you and your older child straight from school to piano lessons on Monday, straight to karate on Tuesday, and so on and so on, try to plan in half an hour or so for your child just to catch his breath.

If you and your child have been living too hectic a life lately, try scheduling in time for nothing. It’s true you might find that this takes some getting used to. But see what new ideas and solutions occur to you when you just hang out and let your mind relax. Naps. Fit one in today!

© 2012, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved.