What Your Child’s Funny Drawings Reveal (Parenting Tips From A Teacher Mom)
It’s trash night at our house, which means I’m on duty clearing out the overflowing art bin by the front door. Dried-out glue sticks, glitter that will inevitably end up in my bed for the next week, crumpled construction paper, and half a dozen loose googly eyes roll out onto the floor as I tip the bin over. Right at the bottom, I find a big sheet of red paper, folded three times, with the word “MOM” scrawled in blue crayon across the front. I unfold it, and it’s me: a giant mint-green tube of toothpaste, two glued-on googly eyes, a wobbly black crayon smile peeking out from the opening at the top. Behind me, stick figures labeled DAD and MILO sit at a dinner table, and the whole thing is titled “FAMILY AT DINNER”.
I called my husband in from the living room, and we both laughed so hard we woke the cat, who was napping on the couch. When Milo wandered in from his room, I asked him, “Want to tell me why I’m toothpaste?” He rolled his eyes like I’d asked the dumbest question he ever heard. “Because you brush my teeth every night. You’re the toothpaste mom.”
It took me a second to get past the initial joke. For a split second I thought, Do I really talk about brushing teeth that much? But as a first grade teacher, I’ve seen this hundreds of times before, even if it’s easy to forget when it’s your own kid. A couple of years ago, a mom came to my parent-teacher conference really upset, clutching a crumpled drawing her 5-year-old had made at school. It was labeled “My Mom”, and it was a big scaly red dragon with smoke coming out of its nose. She kept asking me, “Does he think I’m a monster? Am I that mean all the time?”
I walked her through what I’ve learned over 10 years in the classroom: kids between the ages of 4 and 8 don’t draw what things look like. They draw what things mean. That dragon wasn’t an insult—it was the clearest way a 5-year-old could draw that his mom yells a lot when he’s messy, and yelling feels like smoke coming out of her nose. It’s not a judgment, it’s a description of how he experiences the world. That funny, off-the-wall drawing isn’t just a joke. It’s a window into what’s occupying their brain right now.
Most parents react to these drawings in one of two ways: they laugh, toss it in the trash, and move on, or they overthink it, wondering what it says about them as parents or their kid’s artistic ability. Neither is really wrong, but there are small, easy things you can do to turn that 30-second funny moment into something that helps your kid build their thinking and communication skills, without taking extra time or energy.
After I saw that dragon drawing, I started testing small things with my students and my own kid, and the easiest change is how you ask questions. Instead of asking “Why did you draw me that way?” which can sound like you’re upset they did something wrong, ask something open like “Tell me what’s happening in this picture.” When I asked that instead of my initial question with the toothpaste drawing, Milo told me that my toothpaste arms “squeeze good toothpaste” and the toothpaste mouth sings the brushing song we made up when he was three. It wasn’t a diss about how much I nag him—it was him putting the most consistent, loving routine he has with me down on paper. That question takes 10 extra seconds, and it gives your kid practice turning their messy, jumbled thoughts into a story you can both follow.
The second thing I tell parents is to stop correcting the drawing unless your kid asks for help. It’s so easy to slip into: “Wait, cows don’t have five legs. Let me show you how to draw a cow.” But those extra legs aren’t a mistake. A lot of the time, that’s how a kid draws a cow running really fast, or that they noticed the cow was wagging its tail so hard it looked like an extra leg. When you correct it, you’re telling them their way of seeing the world is wrong, which makes them less likely to draw what they actually think later. I don’t correct Milo’s extra fingers or his food-shaped family anymore, and he draws way more now than he did when I used to quietly point out inaccuracies.
The last thing is just to keep a few, not all. I have a cheap manila folder in my closet labeled “Milo’s Funny Drawings, Age 6” and I tuck one or two in at the end of each month. I throw away 90% of the art that comes home, because there’s just too much of it to keep. But having a few of the silliest ones lets you look back later and see what mattered to them that month. Last year, the folder was full of drawings of dad as a giant pizza, because we did pizza Friday every week. This year, it’s toothpaste mom and mac and cheese houses.
I get why some parents want to save every single piece of paper, but I don’t have the storage for that, and most of the drawings are just scribbles anyway. The funny ones are the ones that stick with you, because they’re the ones that show you how your kid’s brain is working, as they connect the people and routines they love to the things that matter most to them that week.
Last night, I found another crumpled drawing on the kitchen table after dinner. It’s our whole house, shaped like a giant bowl of mac and cheese, with a fork stuck in the roof. The front door is a big noodle that slides open, according to Milo. I brushed the mac and cheese crumbs off it and tucked it into the folder with the toothpaste drawing. A loose googly eye is still rolling around under the couch, and I’ll probably find it when I vacuum next week. Most of the drawings will end up in the trash, and that’s fine. I don’t need to keep every piece of art to get that little peek into how my kid sees the world, one weird, funny drawing at a time.
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