How do I help my kids play more creatively instead of defaulting to screens?

Here's what Nasreddin Hodja would notice: you can't teach someone else to play. You can only stop getting in the way. Children are born knowing how to play. They lose it slowly—through being told they're doing it wrong, through parents who are too anxious to let them be bored, through screens that promise to do the imagination for them. Your job isn't to manufacture creativity. It's to notice when it's dying and defend it. Start by being bored together. This is radical. No activity planned. No fix prepared. Just "we have Saturday morning and nothing to do." Let your kid be restless for twenty minutes. They'll move toward something—dirt, cardboard, a rope, a question. That's play being born. When they're playing, don't interrupt to improve it. Don't explain what they "should" make. Don't videotape it for Instagram. Just watch, occasionally. Be present without taking over. Screens aren't the enemy—paralysis is. A thirty-minute screen break is fine. It's the default, the reflex, the replacement for thinking that kills play. When you offer real boredom, real materials, real unstructured time—and when they see you playing (actually playing, not performing)—they remember how. The paradox: you have to do less to get more creativity. That's Hodja's territory.