Three Ways To DIY: The Creative Family

The term "instant classic" is a well-used oxymoron we scrupulously avoid, but Amanda Blake Soule's The Creative Family is a book we'd quietly slip into any mother's diaper bag. Gently proscriptive yet warmly inspirational, Soule's book keeps things simple and advocates simplicity, radiating a sense of harmonious shared creativity as a foundational value of family life. "The most important, and perhaps most obvious, factor in your child's creative lives is to model a creative life yourself," she writes in the opening sentence, and the book stays true to its aim in presenting parents as active participants in the creative dance rather than simply its choreographers.

The book is full of great advice and clever activities, and offers basic introductions to a variety of crafting activities some parents might assume are beyond the reach of young children.

In one sense Soule, who blogs as SouleMama, is an anti-Martha Stewart figure, a proponent of "good times" rather than "good things" who elevates process over product in almost every case. In another, however, there is the same risk of establishing norms and quality standards for self-expression that are Stewart's stock and trade, and there will be readers who find Soule's delineation of the proper tools of creativity to be familiarly constraining. The Portland, Maine mother of three's priorities lean towards the simple, the tactile, and the historical, ignoring the realm of contemporary creative expression we also live in - the technological tools and chemical processes introduced so seamlessly in DIY Kids or the messy toy hacks and modifications our own family engages in as a key component of our shared creative life.

In the end this is probably a question of aesthetics more than anything else, and every creative person has the right to an aesthetic, even when writing a handbook for creativity. But the question of why a spray-painted stencil hoodie would seem out of place in The Creative Family but not, strictly speaking, the "creative family," is one worth investigating as you identify your own family's creative style.