Why Art and Emotional Expression Matters for Kids: A Teacher’s Perspective
The goldfish crumbs were still sticking to the tabletops when Leo pulled out his paper for free art time last Tuesday. For three months, he’d drawn nothing but cement trucks, each one carefully outlined in blue, with tiny black dots for tires. On this day, he grabbed the thick black crayon out of the bin and covered the whole page in a swatch so heavy the paper started to tear. Next he pulled out red, scribbled it so fast his elbow knocked over a glue stick, and didn’t even stop to pick it up.
Mia, the girl sitting next to him, leaned over and squinted. “That’s just messy. You can’t even tell what it is.” A couple other kids turned to look, nodding along. I wiped a hand on my jeans and walked over, not rushing to correct Mia or fix Leo’s mood. I pulled a chair beside him, nodded at the page, and said, “That’s a lot of color for one page. Want to tell me what’s going on here?”
Leo stared at the paper for a full minute, his thumb picking at a loose edge. “That’s when Mom and Dad yell at each other. The black is after, when the house is all quiet and my chest feels heavy. The red is how it feels when they yell.” I’d checked in with him multiple times since his parents’ custody paperwork came through, and he’d always told the school counselor and me everything was fine. Seven-year-olds don’t have much practice turning that heavy, tight feeling into words. Art doesn’t require practice to work.
I get this question all the time from parents at fall conferences: Why do you do so much art every week? Couldn’t that time be used for extra reading practice or math? Is all this emotional expression stuff really necessary, when there’s so much they need to learn to get ready for next grade?
A few weeks back, a mom came to me frustrated because her 8-year-old, Lila, had been having stomach aches every morning before school after skipping a grade, and refused to talk about what was wrong. She’d tried asking a dozen times, got nothing but “I don’t know.” I told her to clear a small corner of the kitchen counter, dump in whatever random art stuff she had around the house: old magazines, broken crayons, construction paper, even those sticky kid’s scissors that barely cut. No scheduled art time, no requirement to make anything. Just tell Lila it’s there if she wants it, and don’t pester her with “what are you making?” She texted me three days later: Lila had cut out a tiny picture of a girl and glued it in the middle of a page full of giant pictures of other kids, wrote “I’m too small” at the bottom in wobbly pencil, and for the first time told her mom she was scared no one would like her because she was the youngest.
The biggest mistake I see people make is treating art like it’s supposed to be a product, something to hang on the fridge or show off. If you ask a kid “what is that supposed to be?” the second they draw something messy, you’re telling them it has to make sense to other people to count. Instead, try asking “what colors did you pick for this?” or “how did it feel to draw that?” That’s a small shift, but it opens things up instead of shutting them down. You also don’t need fancy supplies. I keep a bin of old cereal boxes, junk mail, and crayons missing their labels in my classroom. The less precious the supplies, the more willing kids are to make something messy with them. And if they don’t want to talk about their work after? Just say “It looks like you got a lot of feeling out on that page” and walk away. They don’t have to turn it into words right away to get the benefit.
Last year I had a third grader, Javi, who got sent to the office at least once a week for acting out during reading. He struggled with dyslexia, and got so frustrated when he couldn’t sound out words that he’d flip his desk or yell at the kid next to him. We started adding 10 minutes of free drawing before our small group reading. Some days he’d fill whole pages with angry scribbles, pressing so hard the paper tore. After a month, his outbursts dropped to once every couple of weeks. He told me it was easier to sound out words when his chest wasn’t “all full of mad.” That makes sense. Kids’ brains haven’t developed enough to turn big, messy feelings into words before they spill over. Art gives them a place to put the feeling first, before it comes out as a tantrum or a stomach ache or stubborn silence.
After Leo told me about the black and red drawing, he crumpled it up and threw it in the trash can. He got a new piece of paper and drew a cement truck, just like usual. He didn’t cry, he didn’t have a big emotional breakthrough. He just got the feeling out, and that was enough.
We still have parents and admin ask why we prioritize 20 minutes of daily free art over extra skill practice or test prep, and I don’t have a fancy spreadsheet of test scores to show them. I just tell them about Leo, and Lila, and Javi. Some days nothing comes of the 20 minutes. Some days a kid draws a truck and goes on with their day. But every once in a while, a kid gets something that’s been sitting heavy in their chest out onto a piece of paper, and that’s worth more than any extra math worksheet I could assign. It’s not a fix for all the hard things kids go through. Some days Leo still comes in quiet after a weekend with his dad, and he doesn’t want to draw anything messy. But it’s a tool. It’s always there, it’s always simple, and it meets kids where they are, even when they can’t meet us with words yet.
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