What Your Child’s Funniest Drawings Reveal About Their Development
I was digging crumpled goldfish crackers out of my first grader’s backpack last Tuesday, the night before her soccer practice, when a folded sheet of construction paper slipped out and landed at my feet. It was a family portrait, and I laughed so hard I snort-laughed, waking the napping dog on the couch. In the drawing, I’m a giant blue circle with 10 thin stick arms, every single one curled around a brown coffee mug. My husband, who takes work calls from his home office six hours a day, has a head shaped exactly like our wifi router, two antennae sticking straight up. Our 3-year-old golden retriever has seven legs, and every leg ends in a tiny yellow french fry. My daughter drew herself 10 feet tall, in the center of the page, holding a pink lollipop bigger than my head.
I stuck it on the fridge, posted it to our family group chat, and a few friends replied with their own favorite funny kid drawings. One had a 4-year-old’s drawing of a trip to Target where the entire checkout line was made of unicorns eating popsicles. Another had a second grader’s portrait of their teacher that gave her 12 eyes, “because she sees everything when we’re trying to sneak candy.”
I started volunteering in the school’s art room a few months ago, and I’ve heard a lot of parents ask the same questions I’ve wondered: why do kids draw all these silly, wonky things? Is it normal that proportions are all off? Should I be correcting them to help them learn to draw “right”? The art teacher, Ms. Lopez, says most of the time these funny drawings aren’t mistakes at all—they’re just kids showing you what they actually notice about the world.
I had that wake-up call with my older son when he was 5. He drew a family portrait where I had no mouth at all. I panicked for a minute, scrolling through random parenting takes in my head, wondering if it meant he thought I never listened to him, or that there was some emotional issue I was missing. Ms. Lopez told me not to jump to conclusions, just ask him. When I did, he shrugged and said, “You were on your work phone the whole time I drew this, so I forgot to put it in.” That was it. No hidden meaning, just a kid drawing what he was seeing in the moment.
The small, practical things I’ve picked up since then don’t take any extra time out of a busy day, which I appreciate more than anything. Most of us don’t have an hour a week to do formal art lessons, so these tiny shifts work for our chaotic routine.
First, instead of just saying “wow that’s funny, great job” and sticking it on the fridge, ask one specific question. It doesn’t have to be a long conversation. You can do it while you’re stirring pasta or waiting for the school bus. I usually ask, “Tell me about your favorite part of this” or “How come the dog has seven legs?” It takes 30 seconds, and it lets the kid tell you the story behind the drawing, instead of you just guessing. When I asked my daughter about the seven french fry legs, she told me that every time we go through the McDonald’s drive through, we give the dog one fry, and she thinks he deserves six more so he never runs out. That’s the kind of thing I never would have figured out on my own.
Second, don’t correct the “mistakes.” I see so many parents lean over and say, “Wait, people only have two arms, silly. Let me show you how to draw it right.” Ms. Lopez says that’s the fastest way to make kids stop drawing for fun. Little kids aren’t trying to make photorealistic portraits when they draw. They’re trying to communicate what matters most. If my daughter thinks I need 10 arms to hold all the coffee and drive the car and pack lunches and tie soccer cleats, that’s her story. She’s not wrong, she’s just telling me how she sees my days. Correcting her would just tell her that her way of seeing the world isn’t good enough. If she wants to draw the dog with seven legs, that’s fine. She’ll learn how proportions work when she’s ready.
Third, you don’t need a fancy scrapbook to keep all these drawings, just keep them somewhere easy to get to. We have a manila folder taped to the inside of our pantry door, and we add one funny drawing a week to it. Every few months, we flip through it together, and the kids love remembering why they drew what they drew. It takes 10 seconds to add a new one, and it’s way easier than keeping every single drawing piled in a junk drawer in the basement.
Last night, I found another crumpled drawing under the living room couch, this one of our mailman drawn as a giant green turtle with a bag for a shell. My daughter said he stopped to pet the dog for five minutes on our porch yesterday, so he’s slow, so he’s a turtle. I added it to the pantry folder, right next to the seven-legged french fry dog.
Some days I still catch myself worrying that I should be doing more to teach her how to draw “properly,” or that all these silly drawings mean she’s not learning the skills she needs for art class. But so far, letting her draw whatever weird, funny thing she wants has worked better than any lesson I could give her. She still gets excited to pull out her crayons every afternoon, I still get a new laugh every week, and I get to see all the little, silly parts of the world that I would have missed if I wasn’t looking through her eyes. One of these days she’ll start drawing people that look like people, and dogs that have four legs, and I’ll probably miss these weird, funny drawings more than she will. For now, though, I’m fine with the 10-armed coffee moms and turtle mailmen.
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