Let your children watch a lot of television. Don't talk to them, and definitely don't expand on their natural interests. Be rigid and create an environment that has little to no structure. Follow this advice only if you want to stifle your children's creativity.

"We don't just want little robots who can parrot back everything we say," says Dr. Harvey Karp, associate professor of pediatrics at UCLA School of Medicine and author of The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer (Bantam, 2003). "We want them to be able to take ideas and juggle and rearrange them."

As parents, you can help develop this creativity when your baby is less than a year old. Creativity starts in early infancy. It's not so much a matter of when it starts, however, says Brittany Birken, who has worked in the field as a teacher, director, trainer and researcher. Birken, who currently leads Florida's efforts for providing consumer education and referral services to families and childcare providers, says it's how the continuum of development progresses as children build creativity through their exploration of themselves, others and the world.

Why is creativity important? "It's an expression of one's self," says Birken. "Creativity is not just about drawings and art, but fundamentally about the way we think and process information. Building a child's creativity allows her to be confident in approaching novel or challenging experiences. Rather than rejecting such experiences, children who have been encouraged to be creative are able to hypothesize, test and retest until they come to an acceptable end."

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