Here is a finding that stopped me when I first read it. In an analysis of 272,599 Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking scores from American children and adults, one researcher found that creative-thinking scores had risen for years, then began falling around 1990 — even as IQ scores kept rising.
Intelligence kept climbing. Imagination, at least on this test, started falling.
I am not a psychologist, a researcher, or a parent. I read this stuff as a curious outsider, and the work here leans heavily on one researcher’s analysis of test scores, which is a finding from a particular dataset, not settled science or a universal rule about how every child has changed. Take it as something to think with, not a verdict on your own kids.
The researcher is Kyung Hee Kim, then an assistant professor at the College of William & Mary. Around 2010 and 2011 she analyzed the American norm samples of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, developed in 1966 and re-normed in 1974, 1984, 1990, 1998 and 2008. Her analysis suggested that creativity scores had risen alongside IQ for decades, then turned and started a steady decline around 1990, with the sharpest drop among the youngest children.
Speaking about what she’d found, Kim said, “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant.” The paper, “The Creativity Crisis,” landed in the Creativity Research Journal in 2011, and the worrying part was the timing. The Flynn effect, the long-documented rise in IQ scores over time, was still part of the backdrop. Kids were testing smarter and, on this measure, less imaginative at the same time.
The two tests are measuring different machinery. IQ tests are built around convergent thinking, the kind where there is one correct answer and your job is to find it. The Torrance tests measure divergent thinking instead, the open-ended business of generating lots of ideas from one prompt.
Kim’s own framing leaned on this gap. If intelligence and creativity were the same thing, she noted, the rising IQ of the Flynn effect should have dragged creativity up with it. It didn’t. A rising IQ score tells you much less about whether a child can take a paperclip and dream up forty uses for it.
So what shifted? Nobody can prove a single cause, and Kim’s analysis is correlational, but the timing has drawn researchers to the structure of childhood itself. Possible culprits include more screen time, more booked-out schedules, and more standardized testing pressure eating into recess.
I can’t say if all or even any of these play a role but what I can say is that the way kids grow up now is a lot different to how I did.
My summers as a kid in rural Ireland in the mid-1990s were long and unstructured, whole days outside with no adult-led plan, a vague instruction to be home by dark, and boredom as the default state. No screen, no parent acting as entertainer. I had to work out what to do with myself, which sometimes meant taking small risks nobody was watching. I don’t remember any of it as deprivation. It was just ordinary.
Now, I watch friends of mine with children, and the contrast is stark without anyone doing anything wrong. Every slot is booked with an activity or a lesson, supervision is constant, free roaming barely happens. I am not saying they’re bad parents, and I have no idea how I’d do it myself, with no kids and no qualifications to wave around.
Most of the test’s figural subscales, including fluency, originality, elaboration and resistance to premature closure, began dropping around 1990. According to Peter Gray’s, a research professor at Boston College, reading of Kim’s data, the biggest decline was in elaboration, the capacity to take an idea and develop it with detail.
From the broader pattern she described, in a passage quoted by Peter Gray, she suggested that “children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional.”
Could it be a result of upbringing?
I don’t know, but it seems we have built a culture that is very good at training and measuring the search for right answers, and we measure that constantly, so we can see it rising. What we don’t measure as often on a school report is whether a child can sit in an empty afternoon and make something out of nothing. On the one test that tried to, the score has been going the other way.
If any of this brings up real worry about a child in your life, a developmental specialist or a good teacher will be far more use than an article reading test data from a distance.
