When Jill Cameron discovered crayon scribbles on a wall for the fourth time in a week, she realized that something more was going on with her 2-year-old son than just driving Mommy bonkers. “It was like an instinct was driving him,” she recalled. “A switch clicked on, and he suddenly just had to draw – everywhere!”
Jill was right: scribbling really is an instinct, hard-wired and crucial to human brain development. Drawing is a language-based impulse that lays the groundwork for reading, writing, and a host of other skills. The freedom of expression encouraged by drawing (as opposed to coloring books or predetermined art projects) provides young children with an exhilarating sense of control and independence and a rare opportunity to rely solely on their own judgment. The more confidence children gain in their facility to transfer the images, ideas and feelings in their heads onto a sheet of paper, the more ease they will have adopting writing for self-expression and communication. While drawing, children hone other cognitive skills, such as thinking creatively, visualizing outcomes, taking risks, solving problems and organizing.
Just as there are predictable milestones in a child’s acquisition of motor skills, so are there universal stages in learning to draw. Each child reaches these stages in their own time, according to the opportunities they are given for practice and exploration and the pace of their motor development.
Developmental Stages of Drawing
2- to 4-year-olds
Most children begin scribbling spontaneously around age 2, as Jill’s son did. At this stage, drawing is closer to physical exercise than art. Lacking fine motor coordination, very young children rely on gross motor strength, swinging the whole art while clenching the crayon or pencil in a fist. Caught up in the pure kinesthetic pleasure of vigorous movement, they pay little attention to where their marks end up, often allowing them to run off the page or overlap.
Over several months of random scribbling, children become more conscious of cause and effect: “I move this crayon and it leaves that mark on the paper.” They develop a liking for particular strokes, which they repeat over and over. They are more careful to stay on the paper and avoid drawing over existing marks. Although they now have enough fine motor control to copy a circle crudely, children still enjoy working with vigorous energy and sometimes make noises to accompany their hand movements.
Around the age of 3, the noises morph into words as children assign names to their scribbles, such as dancing, running or flying. The marks are not longer random scribbles (although they may still appear so to us), but symbols for something in the child’s world that can also be described with a word. The dawning of this connection between symbolic marks and words is a major milestone in linguistic development. Improved fine motor coordination allows many children to grasp a drawing implement with fingers rather than a fist. A greater variety of strokes are placed with deliberate care on the paper and recognizable shapes emerge, particularly circles.
4- to 9-year-olds
Children ages 4 to 7 delight in drawing suns, radials and mandalas (circles divided by interior lines). These shapes gradually become people with arms and legs attached directly to their heads and simply defined hands and facial features. Children become preoccupied with standard patterns for representing common subjects, such as landscapes consisting of a green stripe for ground, a blue stripe for sky and a sun at the top. Perhaps most important, children begin to use their drawings to tell stories and work out problems.
By age 7 or 8, children use geometric shapes to create people, animals and other objects. They may employ X-ray vision when drawing the exterior of a house, so that the interior also is visible. At 9 or 10, they strive for greater realism, paying more attention to small details and indicating space by overlapping objects or diminishing size to show distance. Prone to compare their peers’ drawings with their own, they often become sensitive and self-critical. Anxious striving for accuracy and conformity continues into the teen years and leads many kids to abandon drawing altogether, since it is no longer a spontaneous act of self-expression. Ideally, writing can now serve that purpose.
What Parents Can Do
Because young children draw instinctively, little parental input is needed apart from giving kids independent access to materials, a convenient place to work and adequate time for exploration. There are a few things parents should avoid doing, however. Try to avoid making sweeping value judgments, such as “That’s so pretty – I love it” or “The other one was better.” They might cause children to view drawing chiefly as a means to gain the parental approval they crave, rather than as a conduit for exploring their creativity. It’s also a good idea to steer clear of critical comments, such as “Trees should be green” or “Let me fix it for you.” Those comments can undermine a child’s creativity and enjoyment.
Open-ended questions encourage a child to reflect on her work. Try questions like: “How did you decide what color to make the tree?” or “Were you thinking of a special memory when you drew this?” If a child has difficulty speaking about their drawing or asks directly for a parent’s opinion, offer descriptive observations that bring the focus back to the process. “Look at all the detail you put into that school bus” or “Those swirly lines look like they were fun to draw.” Hearing about the drawing’s effect on you is also encouraging. For example: “That sunny sky makes me wish we were at the beach again.” Above all, a supportive and accepting attitude will help ensure that your child continues to reap the many rewards of drawing for years to come.
Robyn Des Roches is a certified parent educator with the Parent Encouragement Program (PEP). For more information about PEP parenting classes, visit PEPparent.org
