Why Is Art and Expressing Emotions Important for Kids?
Last October, I stood at the front of my second-grade classroom watching Milo slump into the reading nook after recess, fists stuffed into his hoodie pockets. Ten minutes earlier, he’d gotten into a shoving match with his best friend Jake over who got the last turn on the blacktop swing, and when I’d pulled him aside to ask what happened, he’d just pressed his lips together and shaken his head so hard his glasses slipped down his nose. I tried again: “Want to talk about how mad you are?” Nothing. The crayon bin was tipped over next to the nook, left open from morning free choice, and a crumpled sheet of navy construction paper was tucked under a bean bag. I just nudged the whole pile over to his feet with my shoe and walked back to help the kids pull out their math books, no speech, no demand that he draw anything.
He sat there for almost 15 minutes, staring at the paper. I glanced over every few minutes, expecting him to get up and bother the kid next to him or fall asleep on the bean bag. Instead, he finally grabbed a black crayon out of the bin, pressed so hard the tip broke, and started scribbling. Huge, jagged lines that went right off the edge of the paper. Then he swapped for red, covered the whole page in overlapping slashes, crumpled the whole thing up as tight as he could, and threw it into the trash can by the door. He pulled out another sheet, did the exact same thing, then a third. On the fourth, he picked up green, drew a lopsided swing set, then a stick figure with a big X drawn over its chest. He looked up at me, waved me over, and said, “Jake said he’s never going to be my friend again.”
That interaction is the first thing I think of when parents ask me, at back-to-school night or parent-teacher conferences, why we spend so much time on art when there’s reading and multiplication to practice. A lot of people hear “emotional expression through art” and think it’s just fluffy, extra stuff for when the real work is done. I get it. When test scores take up so much space in conversations about elementary school, it makes sense to wonder if all that scribbling and gluing is worth the 20 minutes a day we carve out for it.
I had a student two years ago, Lila, whose parents split up that fall. She never once brought it up in class, not even when we did our “what I did this weekend” writing assignments. But every Friday during art, she drew the same picture: a square house split straight down the middle with a thick black line. Her mom stood on one side, her dad on the other, and a tiny stick figure of her holding one hand from each side, right in the crack. She did this every week for three months. I never said anything, just let her draw it. One Friday in January, she added a golden retriever to each half of the house, then looked up and said, “I get a dog at Mom’s and a dog at Dad’s now. It’s not just the crack anymore.” That’s when the words came—after she’d drawn the crack 12 times first.
Most of the time, kids don’t have the words for the big, messy feelings they carry around. Their brains aren’t done growing the part that lets them sort out “I’m mad because Jake took my swing” from “I’m scared Jake doesn’t like me anymore” and put that all into a sentence that makes sense. When they’re that worked up, asking them to talk just shuts them down. Art doesn’t demand words. It just lets them get the feeling out, somewhere outside their own head.
The best part is, this doesn’t take fancy supplies or big plans at home, either. You don’t need an art easel or a set of expensive watercolors. Just keep a box of scrap paper (the back of old junk mail works fine) and a bag of half-used crayons or markers somewhere your kid can reach it without asking. If they’re upset, don’t send them to their room and say “go draw your feelings” — that can feel like a punishment. Instead, just say “I see you’re really upset right now. The crayons are out on the kitchen table if you want them.” Don’t comment on how good or bad their drawing is, either. If they want to show you, just ask “Do you want to tell me about this?” and leave it at that if they say no. No pressure to fix anything, just let them put the feeling down on paper.
I’ve had more than one parent tell me they don’t have time for this, that homework and chores and piano practice take up all the after-school space. But here’s the thing I always point out: all those unexpressed feelings take up space in your kid’s brain, too. If they’re still holding onto the fight they had with their friend at recess, or the worry that they’ll mess up their spelling test, they can’t focus on that multiplication worksheet anyway. Last semester, I had a student who couldn’t finish his writing assignments — he’d just sit and stare at the page for 20 minutes, his foot tapping a mile a minute. I noticed he drew tiny basketballs all over the margins of every paper he turned in. So I told him, before you start writing, draw three basketballs on a scrap piece of paper, any way you want, then get started. It worked. He got that wiggly, anxious energy out through the pencil, and then he could focus on the words. Art didn’t take time away from his writing — it helped him do it better.
Last week, Milo brought in a drawing he did at home after school. It’s him and Jake on the same swing, both grinning, holding a red striped bag of popcorn between them. He said they made up last weekend at the birthday party they both went to, and he drew it because it felt so good to be friends again that he wanted to keep it.
I still get the question all the time: is art and expressing emotions really that important? I don’t give a big speech about self-esteem or creativity anymore. I just think about Milo, sitting in the reading nook 10 minutes after a fight, unable to say a word until he’d scribbled three pages full of red and black. It doesn’t solve every problem. Milo still gets mad sometimes, and he still doesn’t want to talk about it right away. Lila still has hard days going back and forth between two houses. But both of them know they can put those hard feelings somewhere, before they have to figure out what to do with them.
I still keep Milo’s first crumpled scribble in the back of my desk drawer. Most weeks, there’s a new kid who won’t talk after recess, or a parent who wonders why we don’t just do more worksheets. There’s no neat answer that works for everyone. But right now, keeping a bin of crayons out and 15 minutes free for scribbling works for us. And that’s enough.
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