What Your Child’s Funniest Drawings Tell You About Their Development (Parenting Tips)
Last week, I was stacking crumpled napkins and folding construction paper after my pre-K class’s end-of-year art show when Mia, one of my student’s moms, pulled me aside, phone in hand. “You’re the expert,” she said, laughing, then turned the screen toward me. It was a photo of 4-year-old Jax’s latest family portrait. Jax’s dad took up 90% of the page: a giant fuzzy blue circle for a head, 12 stick legs fanning out from the bottom, zero arms anywhere. Mia was a tiny pink stick figure squished in the top right corner, the family golden retriever was bigger than she was and had nine scattered eyes, and Jax’s own self-portrait was just a wobbly purple scribble dead center. “He swears this is us,” Mia said. “I keep telling him people only have two legs. Should I be worried? Did I miss a step in teaching him how to draw right?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her I have a 6-year-old son at home whose drawing of our last grocery trip is taped to my fridge, and it features a banana with a handlebar mustache, a cashier who’s a green blob wearing five hats, and a shopping cart with three wheels of wildly different sizes. I laughed right along with her, because I’ve had the exact same thought: when did we start thinking every drawing our kid makes has to be proportional to be good?
A lot of parents see these silly, wonky drawings and immediately jump to two conclusions: either my kid is behind developmentally, or I need to teach them how to draw “correctly.” But what I’ve learned as a teacher and a parent is that kids don’t draw what they see—they draw what they know, and what matters most to them in that moment. Jax’s 12 legs aren’t a mistake. When I asked Jax about it the next day, he ticked each leg off on his fingers: “That one’s for kicking soccer balls, that one’s for chasing me around the backyard, that one’s for jumping on the trampoline, that one’s for pushing me on the swing…” By the time he got to 12, he’d run out of fingers, but you got the idea. To Jax, dad is all movement, all fun, all legs that take him places. He’s the most important thing in the picture that day, so he gets the most space and the most legs. Mia being squished in the corner? That didn’t mean Jax loves her less. It just meant that when he drew the portrait, he and his dad had just come from a weekend soccer tournament, and that’s what was top of mind.
The biggest mistake I see parents make with these funny drawings is correcting them right away. Saying “no, people don’t have 12 legs” or redrawing the figure on the page to “show them how” doesn’t teach them anything—it just tells them their version of the world is wrong. Instead, the first thing I tell parents to do is stop correcting, and start asking. Point to the silliest part and say, “Tell me about this part.” That’s it, that’s the whole first step. It takes 10 seconds, and it gives you a window into how your kid’s brain works that nothing else does. When my son drew that mustache banana, I asked him about it, and he reminded me that the cashier at the grocery store had joked that our lumpy banana looked like it had a mustache when she scanned it. That was the funniest thing that happened all week to him, so it earned a prime spot on the drawing. I never would have remembered that small, silly moment if I hadn’t asked.
Another simple shift I recommend is to skip the fancy traceable drawing kits and stencils, unless your kid specifically asks for them. Just leave a stack of blank paper and a box of crayons on the kitchen table, and let them draw what they want. If you want to join in, sit next to them and draw your own picture, don’t redraw theirs to “fix” it. I’ve had so many parents tell me they bought how-to-draw sets for their 4-year-olds and got upset when the kid just scribbled all over the example pages. That’s not the kid failing—that’s the kid doing what they’re supposed to do. They don’t want to draw someone else’s idea of a cat; they want to draw their cat that has eight eyes because it stares at them while they eat snacks.
Of course it’s reasonable to wonder if development is on track. If your kid is 7 or older and still draws all people as unrecognizable blobs with no distinct body parts, that’s something worth mentioning to your pediatrician, just to rule out any fine motor or vision delays. But 9 times out of 10, that extra head or 12 legs or mustached fruit is just normal, healthy kid development.
I still catch myself slipping into old habits sometimes. Last month, my son drew a portrait of our family at the zoo, and he drew me as a giant pink lollipop. My first instinct was to say “wait, I’m not a lollipop, can you draw me with a head and legs?” But I stopped myself, and asked him why I was a lollipop. He said “because you taste like strawberry when you hug me, and you’re sweet.” I stuck that drawing next to the mustache banana on the fridge.
I still sometimes worry that I’m not teaching him enough formal art skills, that he’ll get to first grade and not know how to draw a proper person with two arms and two legs. But then I look at all the weird, funny drawings stacked in the drawer under my bed, each one with a little pencil note on the back about what it meant, and I remember that these aren’t just silly scribbles. They’re the only record I’ll ever have of how my son saw the world when he was small. Some days I get it right, some days I almost mess it up by correcting him before I think, but I’m trying. Right now, that’s enough.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Your Child’s Funniest Drawings Tell You About Their Development (Parenting Tips)