I believe that if you do something with your children it can have a long lasting impact and can create a love for many things, arts, crafts, outdoors, or games for example. My child and myself are regular attendees of a quilting guild, an artists guild, and a scrapbooking club I believe the group environment helps inspire and see different ways of thinking. Another creative outlet our family loves to do together is cooking very free form, rarely do we use recipes and when we do rarely does what we make end up looking like the recipe. Granted we have had some weird stuff to eat, seaweed, olive, and sausage soup for an example, but we all enjoy the failures, even if it is just through laughter. Storytelling is another of our favorites, we read books, but the bed time story is always completely made up and can become a very long multi-night saga with children being characters, recently my little boy has been a knight, a wizard, a baseball enthusiast, and a frog. We also accept that being creative may lead to massive messes and even destruction, these things happen, and while we will sometimes try to redirect we do not punish these behaviors. Sometimes children need to see how something works, or really think the walls look better with a crayon mural, and we believe these to be healthy behaviors.
Cotton Babies wants to know "How do you encourage a creative, artistic spirit in your baby, toddler or young child?"