What Happens When You Stop Telling Kids ‘Draw A Happy You’ And Let Them Be Honest
The laundry basket was teetering on the edge of the kitchen chair last Tuesday, and I was picking up half-cheddar Goldfish crumbs off the table when my 8-year-old Mia slid a crumpled piece of construction paper across the sticky juice stain towards me. “I took your advice and I drew a face for me,” she said, wiping a smudge of purple crayon off her jeans.
For as long as she’s been drawing, Mia has avoided drawing herself. She’ll sketch our golden retriever chasing squirrels, her best friend Lila on the swing set, even the weird mushroom that grows in our backyard every spring. But when any assignment asks for a self-portrait, she ends up with a stick body and a blank circle where the head should be, or crumples the whole thing up and shoves it in the trash. A week earlier, when her third grade teacher sent home the “All About Me” assignment that required a self-portrait, Mia had left it sitting in her backpack for five days, ignoring every time I asked about it.
I texted her old first grade teacher, who’s always been good about this kind of thing, because I was starting to wonder if it was a red flag. She wrote back immediately, no fancy jargon, just simple advice: “Stop telling her to draw a happy, pretty you. Just tell her she can draw whatever face she feels like. No rules, no corrections. If she draws a monster face, that’s fine. If she draws a frown, that’s fine. Just ask her to tell you about it when she’s done.” That was the advice I passed on to Mia, after I bit back the instinct to say “it’s easy, just draw a smile!”
Back to Tuesday: I leaned over the paper, and there it was. A big lopsided circle for a head. Two squinty black eyes, one a full centimeter lower than the other. A big open frown scribbled all over with purple crayon, and three thick scratchy blue lines cut across each cheek. It wasn’t happy. It wasn’t pretty. If I’d seen this a month earlier, I would have laughed a little nervously and said, “Oh, that’s so sad! Why don’t we add a smile next to it? You love going to school, remember the field trip last month?” That’s what I did two years ago, when she drew a faceless gray blob for the kindergarten art show: I snuck a tiny yellow smile in the corner before I turned it in, and she never mentioned it, but she wouldn’t stand near it when we went to see the show.
This time, I just nodded and tapped the purple scribble. “What’s this part?” I said. Mia climbed up on the chair next to me and poked the scribble with her finger. “That’s when my words get stuck,” she said. “When Lila plays with Emma at recess and I don’t know what to do, so I just don’t say anything. It feels all scribbly inside my mouth.” Then she pointed to the blue lines. “Those are the tears I don’t let anyone see at school.”
I just sat there for a minute, and that’s the thing I didn’t expect: I didn’t have to fix it. I didn’t have to tell her it would get better, or convince her she’s actually happy most of the time. I just said, “That makes a lot of sense. I get that scribbly feeling in my mouth too when I have to call a customer service person.” She giggled, and that was it. We didn’t redraw it. We didn’t add a smile. She put it in her folder to turn in the next day.
That’s the insight I’ve been turning over ever since. We spend so much time asking kids to show us their best selves, even in tiny things like art assignments, that we teach them to hide the parts that aren’t pretty or happy or easy. Most of the time, when a kid won’t draw themselves, it’s not that they can’t draw—it’s that they know we want a happy face, and they don’t feel like a happy face right now, so they’d rather not show anything at all.
The practical stuff is so easy, you don’t have to do any big life changes to try it. First, if your kid won’t draw themselves or draws something that feels off, don’t grab the crayon and fix it. I used to do that all the time, without even thinking. Second, instead of commenting on whether it’s good or bad or sad, just ask them to tell you about a specific part of it. Tapping a scribble and asking what that is gets way more honesty than saying “why are you so sad?” Third, leave all the crayons where they can reach them. I used to tuck the black and dark purple and brown crayons in the back of the box because they “ruined” bright drawings. Now I keep them right up front. Kids need dark colors to draw how they feel.
Last week I went in for parent-teacher conferences, and Mia’s portrait was hanging on the bulletin board right by the door, right next to all the other kids’ drawings of smiling kids with sunshines around their heads. A little girl from Mia’s class stopped next to it when I was walking by and tugged her mom’s hand. “That’s my face too,” she said, “when I forget my math homework.” No one had said anything to Mia about changing it. Her teacher just put it up like it was exactly what it was supposed to be.
It’s not all fixed now. Mia still draws blank heads some weeks, when she’s had a really bad stretch at school. Last Saturday, after she lost her soccer game and forgot her lunch at the park, she started a self-portrait and left the face blank. I didn’t say anything. I just folded laundry and left her at the table. Two hours later, she drew a face that was half smile, half frown, with a big ice cream cone in the hand. That’s okay. It’s more honest than any perfect happy smile I ever made her draw. I still catch myself wanting to ask her to make it nicer, to make it look more like the “real” happy kid I see. But I’m trying to remember: the face she draws is the real her. And that’s the one we should want to see.
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