Parenting & Family Quote by Brenda Ueland

A deceptively simple sentence, “All children have creative power” reads like a rebuke to every gatekeeper who treats imagination as a luxury good. Brenda Ueland wasn’t a motivational influencer; she was a writer and teacher who spent decades arguing that creativity is less a rare gift than a human baseline, routinely suppressed by schooling, manners, and the fear of looking foolish. The intent is democratic: it pulls “creative” away from the museum and hands it back to the kitchen table, the notebook margin, the made-up game.

The subtext is sharper than the wording. By choosing “all,” Ueland quietly indicts the systems that sort kids early into “talented” and “not,” then congratulate themselves for having discovered what they helped manufacture. “Power” matters too. Not “interest,” not “hobby,” but agency - the ability to remake experience, to generate possibilities, to narrate one’s life rather than just endure it. It’s a claim about voice and permission as much as art.

Context deepens the stakes. Writing across a 20th century obsessed with efficiency, expertise, and standardized measures of merit, Ueland is pushing back against the era’s creeping assumption that value must be ranked. She frames childhood creativity as a natural resource that adults often mine and then pave over. Read now, amid test-driven curricula and algorithm-fed sameness, the line lands as both encouragement and warning: the creative impulse is common; what’s uncommon is how reliably we teach people to doubt it.