This may not be obvious, but as your kitchen table turns into a huge crafting mess, your kids are gaining skills that will be crucial to them all their lives. From the moment a child is conceived, they are constantly developing and learning craft skills is an important part of the process.

You could be making small clay shapes, doing origami, or building complex toys – all these seemingly little thing shape and form your child’s brain.

I’ll name just a few things.

Imagination

You can’t make if you can’t imagine it. Making things with their hands gets the child’s creativity going and as a result, their imagination skills grow immensely. In order to craft 3-dimensional objects, the brain needs to think in 3D – a skill many people barely develop in their life. Same with choosing colors – to know how to best color a postcard, you need to see the colors in your mind’s eye first, and this only comes with practice.

Fine motor skills

This is sort of obvious. The kid will learn to handle tools and their own hands in order to achieve desired physical results on an actual tangible thing. The actions needed to get there are often very small in nature and so your child will inevitably be developing their motor skills as he or she practices crafts. Different crafts stimulate different kinds of motor skills – paper folding needs a relaxed but steady hand, while wood carving needs you to balance force with precision. That way, arts and crafts increase the agility and dexterity of your child.

Focus

In order to make something, you actually need to sit there and produce it and it takes time. Kids are known to be fidgety – craft is a great way to get some of that under a bit control. Focus is a skill that will have lifelong benefits for your kid – from school, to college or university, to work, to personal projects. The latter ones are particularly in need of good focusing skills, since in real life nobody’s watching or forcing you when you’re doing for yourself and it’s easy to slip into the myriad different other things that try to steal your attention.

The exact type of crafts you bring into your child’s life will vary based on several things – their own interests, their attention span, and their needs – but there’s no doubt it’s one of the best ways to help your child grow and develop in positive ways.