“Just have lots of ideas,” he advised, “and throw away the bad ones.”

That’s good advice for parents who want to help their child develop creative thinking skills. One of the best ways to encourage this type of thinking is to ask your child lots of questions that don’t have definite answers.

For instance, if you’re stuck in traffic, you might ask, “What kind of invention could we create to make our car get through this traffic faster?”

You may also want to teach your child the technique of brainstorming, which is used to come up with many possible solutions to a problem.

Here are some rules for brainstorming:

• Set an amount of time to spend on brainstorming.

• Get someone to write down all ideas as they come.

• State the question. Then tell people that they should voice all the possible ways to solve the problem.

• Make sure no one judges any ideas when you’re brainstorming. The wilder and crazier the ideas may seem, the better the brainstorming session will be.

• Try to hook ideas together. Feel free to build on what another person has said.

• After you have all the ideas written down, choose the best idea.

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