Parental support and artistic creativity at the beach: an observational approach

Abstract

Artistic creativity is the production of novel resources that contribute to the arts (Chemi, 2017) and can be integral towards improving the mental health of both artists and consumers of art. When studying factors that may contribute to artistic creativity, parenting may be an important consideration. Supportive parenting contributes to child development by practicing parental sensitivity, cognitive stimulation to learning, and unconditional love (Lin, 2023), and may encourage children to find healthy ways of expressing their emotions artisitically. An observational research design was conducted to assess the relationship between parental support and artistic creativity. We hypothesized that children with parental supervision engage in artistic hobbies more frequently compared to children without supervision. A total of 60 young children were observed for a minute each on a web camera featuring the coast of Maho Beach in Sint Marten. Parental supervision was coded as present if a child was present alongside a guardian and artistic creativity was measured, based on if participants engaged in artistic hobbies. Contrary to predictions, results indicate that children with parental supervision do not engage in artistic hobbies more frequently than children without supervision. Lack of statistical support for the relationship between parenting and creativity may be due to limited time in observing participants and using parental supervision as an indicator for parental support. Future research should be conducted with longer observation periods and coding for different kinds of parental support towards children.