How to encourage imagination in children

Give a child a cardboard box and come back in an hour. It might be a rocket by then, or a shop, or a cave with strict rules about who may enter. Nobody taught it to be any of those things. The box simply did not argue.

We think imagination is a child’s greatest superpower, and we admit to bias: we spend our days building worlds for children to walk into. Yet the longer we do it, the more we notice how little imagination asks of adults. Mostly, it needs us to leave some room.

A child’s imagination grows in the gaps: the part of the story that is not shown, the toy that could be anything, the afternoon with nothing planned. Here is how to make more of those gaps at home, without buying anything or turning it into a project.

Three things it needs

Roughly, three. Gaps: something unfinished for them to complete, whether that is a picture, a plot or a cardboard box. Time: imagining is slow, and it rarely gets going in the first five minutes. And permission: a sense that their version is welcome, even when it makes no sense to you, even when the dragon is also a bus.

Almost all the advice below is one of those three wearing a different coat.

Gaps: things that are not finished

Choose open-ended over finished. A toy that does one thing does it for the child. A toy that does nothing in particular has to be turned into something, and the turning is the imagining. Blocks, a box of fabric scraps, a torch, clay, the cardboard box from the last delivery, a stick: these get played with in a hundred ways because they suggest a hundred things.

There is no need to clear out the toy box. Just notice which things get played with in many ways and which in only one, and keep the many-ways things where small hands can reach them. When a child asks what something is for, try asking “what could it be?”

Let stories leave the pictures to them. A story told in words leaves the child to build the rest: the colour of the dragon, the size of the room, the villain’s face. That building is imagination doing exactly what it is for.

There is some interesting research on this. In a small brain-imaging study, 27 children of preschool age were given stories by the same author in three formats: audio only, illustrated, and animated. Compared with audio alone, the illustrated stories eased the strain on the brain’s language network and increased the connection between its visual and other networks, which the researchers read as the pictures and the child’s own visual imagery sharing the work. The animated stories showed less connection between all the networks, which they read as watching at the expense of putting it together (Hutton et al., Brain Imaging and Behavior, 2020). It is one small study of young children, so treat it as a reason to think rather than a rule. Still, it fits what many parents notice: a few still pictures give a story a foothold, while a screen that shows everything leaves less to do.

Older children say something similar about listening. In the National Literacy Trust’s 2024 survey, 52.9% of the 8 to 18-year-olds asked said listening to audio made them use their imagination more than watching videos does (National Literacy Trust, listening in 2024).

So keep reading aloud, long after they can read alone. Tell stories in the car with no book at all. Pick books whose pictures set the scene and leave the rest unsaid. And when a story ends, ask what the place looked like. Their answer will not be the one in your head.

Time: a little boredom is fine

“I’m bored” is uncomfortable to hear, and the instinct is to fix it straight away. It is worth waiting a beat. Boredom is often the few minutes just before a child starts making something up, and if every gap is filled for them, they rarely reach the far side of it.

That does not mean leaving a child to stew. It means an hour that is not scheduled, a car journey without a screen now and again, and an answer to “I’m bored” that hands the problem back kindly: “That’s all right. Something will come to you.”

Permission: questions with no wrong answer

Ask “what happens next?” It is the most useful question a parent carries. Stop a story before the end of a chapter and ask what they think will happen. Ask what a character might be thinking, or what they would do instead. At bedtime, let them carry on a story you started, or begin one for you to finish.

There are no wrong answers, and that is the point. A child who gets used to wondering what happens next starts doing it unprompted: with books, with films, with the walk home from school.

Let them decide something that matters. Imagination grows fastest when a child is steering the story, not just watching it. Games of make-believe do this naturally, which is why they are so absorbing. Stories can do it too: choose-your-own-adventure books, a story you tell together in which they make the big decisions, a game whose rules are theirs.

What matters is that the choice is real. If the story carries on the same way whatever they pick, children notice quickly. If it changes, they lean in, and they spend the time in between imagining both roads.

Where letters fit

This is the thinking behind Journee. Our team writes and paints whole worlds, like the Tinyverse, where crumbs become cliffs, and a child’s story in that world arrives by post, one chapter at a time, with them as the hero and their family written in. A letter has a few pictures and leaves the rest to them. The days between letters are a gap of exactly the useful kind. And with the interactive story, each letter ends with a choice that decides what happens next; the P.S. trick at bedtime is how some families make the most of it. Why letters says more about why we think the post is the right shape for it.

None of this needs a subscription, though. Leave a box out. Let an afternoon stay empty. Ask what happens next. A child’s imagination is already there, and most of the work is simply not getting in its way.