We’ve watched our fair share of Bluey, Paw Patrol, and Minions with seven grandkids; but when we encourage kids to be creators themselves, we move from screen to sketch, from passive to active.

Screen time and sketch time don’t need to be either/or. We don’t expect the screen to go away. (You’re reading this on a screen!) But a child is especially receptive to active creation, for making rather than just watching. While creativity can grow at any age, if the first years make time for art, the child receives a gift that will keep on giving throughout life.

What’s called "talent" as an adult doesn’t come out of nowhere: it’s often the adult accessing an earlier, encouraged energy of discovery. Many an artist has followed their full circle back to the days when blues, yellows, reds, squares, and triangles first electrified their senses. ’’It has taken me my whole life to learn to draw like a child," Picasso famously said.

As a teenager, after his mother died, Claude Monet sketched outdoors and drew caricatures of people in his hometown of Le Havre, decades before he painted his pond reflections at Giverny in the second half of life. Making art was a form of salvation from a great loss suffered in youth.

We see the museum masterpieces of adulthood. What we don’t see are the hours of youthful drawing, without which the pond lilies would not, one day, have floated in an upside-down sky mirror in front of the painter’s imagination.

The imagination that opens early is ready for action. Tactile and sensory, an active imagination wants to make stuff: hold the paintbrush, feel the clay, cut the paper, build the blocks. ’’The maple­wood blocks are all in my fingers to this day," said Frank Lloyd Wright. His mother gave him a set of brightly colored blocks at age nine. His ’’fingers"—his neural pathways for spatial design, depth perception, color, basic shapes, and balance—felt the course of an historic life.

Art-doing builds a child’s confidence. They can be the maker, like the toddler saying, ’’me do it’’ with growing self-assurance. They and the crayons aren’t on the sidelines but are players.

How much time is the child in training as a screen spectator? Digital spectatorship has its place but isn’t the same as holding the brush or feeling the building blocks in hand.

There’s a powerful intergenerational connection happening whenever adults encourage childhood art making, alive in real time. It happens when a parent tapes those scribbled pictures to the fridge, the kitchen museum. Or when artwork from school finds its way onto mom’s or dad’s office wall. Or when a child puts the phone or pad down on a Saturday afternoon and joins other kids in making art at the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Rosenthal Education Center. It will happen with countless future students in CAM’s new classrooms!