Children’s drawings: a window to the inner world of children

Drawing is a very powerful tool in children’s emotional expressiveness. Painting is a liberating act; Nobody teaches us to draw, and it is not necessary, because we naturally begin to do it.

Children are fascinated by drawing and their attention is completely focused on it. It is a game that motivates them, stimulates them and provides them with their own space for concentration.

At certain ages, language is not fully developed and drawing is a fundamental communication vehicle for them.. Drawing, apart from being a very valuable game, is a great resource to understand your feelings and relate to them.

Therefore, it is very important that we do not limit them with indications or restrictions. There is no need to criticize their creations, nor decide for them. It is essential to leave them free so that they can enjoy themselves and we can learn a little more about their inner world..

How is the ability to draw developed?

When a child begins to draw we think that it does not follow any order or model, but it is not true. Children’s drawings are organized based on basic laws, such as uniformity or continuity.

The elements, doodles and figures will be the reflection of successive experiences that the child has and that, after organizing them in his mind, give rise to his personal creation.. That is, the child synthesizes what he observes and from there represents the model that he has created inside him and that has allowed him to organize his perceptions of the environment.

The analysis of children’s drawings has generally been developed from three key aspects: their structure, their theme and the evolution through development in childhood. Graphic creation has stages, but children in all cultures around the world start the same way: doodling.

Between the ages of two and four, children begin the art of drawing by making doodles and lines. From the beginning we can see most of them enjoying this activity. With the passage of time the strokes become more controlled, they will be named to identify them with shapes in the real world and, although they surely do not have any resemblance, it represents a great advance.

Around three years old the shapes emerge. Mandalas, suns, circles, triangles: basic shapes that will later be combined to create multiple designs. From four to seven years old, the first attempts at representation appear.

The images begin to be recognized and the themes are distinguished. They enjoy making figures such as people, houses and trees. The human figure is almost always the preferred theme. In this stage they make a great effort to connect their internal representation intention with the real world. The drawing contains what is meaningful to the child and reflects his or her way of relating to the environment.

From the age of seven, changes occur in the expression of children’s drawings. At these moments a clear differentiation of personal style occurs, color and shape stabilize.

The spatial order enters the scene, the figures and elements begin to have orientation on the paper, for example the lines of the sky or the ground appear.

There will be an increasing number of details, symbols and social content. From now on, and especially if the child continues to develop his artistic side, children’s drawings will become more rich and in adolescence his creativity will be able to explode.

Children’s drawings, translators of emotions

Painting usually plays a very relevant role in the case of children with trauma or other types of pathologies. In these cases, drawing is a way of expressing their internal conflicts.

For a psychologist with adequate training, drawing can be very useful, using it to generate hypotheses regarding the child’s diagnosis or simply to understand their personality. The game established in consultation allows the minor to relax and make contact with an unknown environment without having to feel pressured to speak.

Drawing helps release tension and allows the child to expose their inner self. Through paper and paintings she can communicate her world without having to use verbalization. Free artistic expression fosters a playful environment and offers information about the child’s state of mental development..

The very action of drawing conveys important information. The professional, through the observation technique, You will be able to analyze how the minor expresses himself, sensing that his personality will be reflected in different aspects.: their movements, their attention span, their strokes on the paper, the arrangement of the figures, the elements chosen, the colors, etc.

The relaxed atmosphere encourages children to create freely. or we can even suggest a topic if we want to study a specific area.

Children exposed to great stress or who have suffered trauma reflect their anguish in their drawings. They represent what they have experienced, and can become very explicit depending on their age.

The child is the one who guides the theme of the drawing at all times and therefore painting can act as a mirror where it reflects what needs to be externalized.

What messages do children’s drawings contain?

When a child draws, we can observe many aspects of his development, for example, your attention span.

Children usually enjoy painting very much, so the activity usually surrounds them in a halo of concentration that leaves them absorbed. If they are not able to maintain attention when drawing, they may have worse attention levels in other types of tasks, so it may be interesting to analyze whether there is any attention deficit in the child.

By observing the creations, we can also estimate the degree of complexity of the child’s thinking, even if he or she is advanced for his or her age. Normally, very intelligent children make more complex drawings, while cognitive deficits are associated with poor or lower-level drawings depending on their age.

In addition, A child’s drawings open the doors of his personality and emotions. Painting is a tool that allows them to communicate their way of relating to the environment, they project their family, their house, their friends. They show the events that have caught your attention the most, what has marked your experience.

Children who have suffered catastrophes or wars draw scenes of the conflict, with this they seek to integrate what happened to order it in their mind, to give it meaning and accept it, with this they also transfer their emotions and take a certain distance, it is as if through the paintings will release part of that burden.

On the other hand, when analyzing aspects such as the size of the figures, their distribution, distances and positions, The colors used or the brands and symbols we can unravel many meanings from the content.

What are the colors that stand out? Is there an impulsive, calm, aggressive or nervous streak? Do we find inconsistency between the positions of the figures? Are the characters incomplete? How have the spaces been distributed?

We can establish a dialogue with the child so that Tell us the history of the drawing and thus get your own interpretation. On other occasions, the professional must explore conflicting aspects that the child may not reveal directly or may do so with some type of fantasy.

A child who has been sexually abused may be depicted lying in bed with his father and his father’s hand on his body. Or perhaps, a girl who has a conflict with her mother represents the maternal figure in a distant position with respect to her own, she may not even draw it or she may use dark colors and incomplete lines, perhaps it does not represent some facial or body feature. For example, the mother does not have hands or a mouth.

Of course all these aspects must be studied by a professional and the interpretations of the drawings will be hypotheses that must later be confirmed with an exhaustive psychological examination. Each case has to be analyzed with its own subjectivity.

There are many possible variations and no diagnosis can be made with a simple drawing, so other types of tests and interviews must be taken into account.

Even so, Drawings are a very valuable tool to establish communication with children -also with the elderly in many cases- when we find that direct communication is not rich enough or is closed.

You might be interested…