Why Art and Emotional Expression Matter for Kids, According to a Classroom Teacher
I was stacking math worksheets after morning recess last week when I looked up and saw the room go quiet. Javi was hunched over his desk, knuckles white, and Leo stood three feet away clutching a crumpled drawing. I’d already broken up two minor scuffles that week, so I braced for another shoving match. It turned out Leo had drawn a picture of Javi’s dad, who’d moved out of state three months prior and missed his last two scheduled visits. Javi had never mentioned his dad’s absence to me once before that day. Instead of pulling them aside for the standard “use your words” talk I’d done a hundred times, I grabbed two extra sketchbooks and a handful of colored pencils from the back cabinet. “Both of you draw whatever you’re feeling right now,” I said. “No rules. It doesn’t have to look like anything.”
Ten minutes later, they both slid their drawings across my desk. Javi’s page was covered entirely in black crayon, except for a jagged red hole ripped right through the middle. Leo’s was a lumpy green monster with sharp teeth, a tiny scribbled speech bubble that read “I feel bad I made him mad but my dad left too and I get it.” Neither of them cried, or said much more than that. They put their caps back on the pencils and asked if they could go to recess. I said yes.
I get this question from parents at least once a month, usually during parent-teacher conferences. “I get that art is fun, but is it really that important? My kid’s falling behind in multiplication, shouldn’t we be spending more time on that?” It’s a fair question. I’m a 4th grade teacher, I know how much pressure we all feel around test scores and grade-level benchmarks. I don’t argue that math and reading matter. But what most people don’t see is what I see every day: kids carry around all kinds of big feelings they don’t have words for, and those feelings get in the way of everything else they’re trying to learn.
I saw this with my own son two years ago, when his grandma died. He was 10, and he refused to talk about it with anyone, even me. He’d just shut down when I asked how he was feeling. But every afternoon after school, he’d drag out the old bin of air-dry clay and make the same lumpy sculpture of her golden retriever, over and over. After a couple weeks, I asked him why he kept making them. He shrugged and said it just made the tight feeling in his throat go away. He didn’t need to talk about it yet. He just needed to get the feeling out somewhere, and clay let him do that.
A lot of parents think they need to do big fancy art projects to make this work, but that’s not true. I tell parents to keep a stack of old printer paper and a box of broken crayons on a low shelf in the living room, somewhere kids can reach it without asking. You don’t need expensive watercolor sets or craft kits. When your kid comes home from school upset and won’t tell you what’s wrong, don’t keep pressing them to “use your words.” Just hand them the paper and a crayon and say “draw me what your tummy feels like right now.” That’s it. It’s a 30-second change, no extra time required. I also tell parents to skip the “that’s such a pretty picture” comment when they show you their work. Instead, try “tell me about this dark part here.” It doesn’t have to be a big conversation, just letting them know you see what they put out there is enough.
A week after that fight, Javi brought in a new drawing he did at home. It was him and his dad in a boat, fishing, like they used to do. There was a faint gray smudge in the corner, and he pointed to it and said “that’s the sad part that’s still there sometimes.” It’s not like drawing fixed everything. His dad still doesn’t visit as much as he wants, he still gets that tight chest feeling some days. But now he knows how to get that feeling out, instead of shoving it down until it comes out as a shoving match with a classmate.
I’ve had parents tell me their kid only draws the same car crash over and over after a small fender bender, and worry that’s a problem. It’s not. It’s just their brain working through the thing that scared them. I’ve had parents say their kid only draws pink ponies even when they’re upset, and worry they’re hiding their feelings. That’s fine too. Art doesn’t have to look like a feeling to work. It just has to be a place to put it.
Last Friday, during our free art time, I saw Leo and Javi drawing together at the same table. Javi was drawing that black and red hole again, and Leo was adding little purple stars around it. No one was fighting, no one was yelling. They were just putting their feelings down on paper, where they could see them. I still don’t think art is a replacement for good reading instruction or math practice. And some kids will never want to draw or sculpt, that’s fine too—some prefer building with Legos or writing silly songs, anything that lets them get the feeling out. But I’ve seen enough crumpled drawings and lumpy clay sculptures to know it matters. It matters more than most of us give it credit for.
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