What To Do With All Your Kid’s Artwork: Realistic, Low-Effort Tips For Parents
Last Saturday, I was yanking my rain boots out of the front hall closet when a tower of construction paper and crumpled crayon drawings collapsed onto my feet. Glitter from a 6-month-old handprint turkey got in my sock. A half-macaroni Christmas ornament rolled under the shoe rack. By the time I’d cleared a path to my boots, I was sitting on the entryway rug surrounded by enough kids’ art to cover every wall in our house twice. My husband stepped over a drawing of our cat with six tails and said, “We have to get rid of some of this, right?”
I felt that familiar guilt creep in. I’d seen all the posts: scan every piece, make a custom photo book, turn it into a coaster or a Christmas ornament for grandma. But I never got around to scanning, never had the energy to arrange a photo book, and the coasters sounded like more work than the art was worth. Here I was, a former preschool teacher who should have this figured out, buried under a mountain of purple rectangles my 4-year-old swears are “daddy’s coffee.”
Then I remembered what Ms. Rita, the 30-year veteran teacher I worked with my first year in the classroom, told me when I was panicking about sending home 15 pieces of art per kid every week. She said, “The art isn’t the point. The making is. If we made parents keep everything, they’d end up resenting it, and that’s not good for anyone.” That clicked for me then, and it clicked for me again sitting on that rug Saturday.
When I was in the classroom, I saw it every day. The little boy who’d just moved to town drew 12 blue cars a day for three weeks, all with big wheels. He wasn’t making 12 keepable pieces of art. He was practicing how to draw circles, he was processing the big moving truck that brought his stuff, he was doing something calm and familiar when everything else felt new. By the time he moved on to drawing dinosaurs, he didn’t miss those 12 blue cars. The work was done when he put the crayon down.
That’s the part most of us miss as parents, right? We see the little piece of paper covered in marks, and we think that’s the precious memory we have to hold onto. But the memory is watching them lean over the table, their tongue sticking out the side of their mouth, while they squeeze the glitter glue. The learning is all in the process: figuring out how to hold a crayon, mixing red and blue to make purple, deciding where to put the sun on the page. The paper is just the leftover.
So what do we do with the leftovers, that don’t take over our closets? I’ve tried a bunch of things, and the system that stuck for me is low-effort, no fancy supplies needed. First, every three months, when I’m already folding seasonal clothes and cleaning out the fridge, I set 10 minutes aside to sort with the kids. Each of them has a small shoebox (the one their new sneakers came in, that I would’ve thrown away anyway) under their bed. They pick 3 to 4 pieces from that season’s pile to keep forever, and they get to make the call, not me. The first time we did this, I thought they’d pick the handprint art I loved, but my 7-year-old picked a crumpled drawing he did on a napkin at a restaurant, of the stick he found on the beach that looked like a shark. That’s what mattered to him, not the turkey I made him trace his hand for.
Then, before the rest goes to recycling, I pull out my phone and snap a quick photo of each piece, and dump them into a labeled album for each kid in my photos app. I don’t edit them, I don’t name them, I just upload. If I ever want to make a book or pull one out for their high school graduation slide show, it’s there. If I don’t, it didn’t take more than 2 minutes of my time, and it’s not taking up any physical space.
For current art, I hung a 6-foot length of clothesline on the empty wall of our playroom, for $2 at the dollar store, with clothespins. The kids hang up their new favorite pieces, and once a month, when it’s full, they take down the old ones to sort. That way, their work is up where they can see it, which is what they care about more than it being tucked in a closet somewhere. I’ve had other parents tell me they send the extra art home with grandparents, or cut the best bits into greeting cards for relatives, which is also great, but that’s more work than I want to put in, so this works for me.
I still end up with a random drawing tucked in my purse, and a few taped to the fridge, and sometimes I forget to sort for an extra month and a little pile builds up by the front door. I found half a dozen drawings tucked behind the dryer after the avalanche, and I never took photos of those before they went to recycling. It’s not a perfect system, and it doesn’t give me that perfectly curated Instagram-worthy art display. My closet isn’t totally empty, and I still find glitter in my socks from that collapse Saturday.
But the mountain doesn’t feel overwhelming anymore. The kids get to make as much art as they want, we keep the bits that matter most, and the rest gets to go without the guilt. After all, the best part of all that art isn’t the paper we keep. It’s the messy, glittery, six-tailed cat drawing process that got it there. Some days, that’s all the perfect we need.
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