The Importance Of Children's Drawings

“Children’s drawings are a mirror to their emotions” is a thought that has been gaining immense popularity as well as criticism since a couple of years. Researches by the dozen have been carried out in this aspect, some in support while some vehemently denying the same. However, as every psychological research shows, there are going to be people in favour of a certain vision while some will put in every bit of energy they possess to counter the same. Children’s drawings have nonetheless been able to help paediatricians or psychologists understand the behaviour of a child but to what extent can these drawings or scribbles be relied upon? Children’s drawings are visual representations made by children by using tools such as crayons, pencils etc

Drawings are used to not only understand the daily behaviour of children but also to analyse more specific areas like identifying their fears or bringing about a change in their behaviour (Wimmer, 2014). Children’s drawings can be used as a measure for understanding how the child perceives himself/herself in relation to his/her peers, parents, siblings etc. and provide useful insights into their personality and behaviour (Klepsche and Logie, 1982). There have been many renowned psychological researchers who have been in support of using children’s drawings as diagnostic tools. Goodnow (1977) and Sandow (1997) described how drawings can be viewed as an expression of emotions and offer an insight into the child’s personality. These drawings can be used to analyse a variety of emotions and perceptions (Furth, 1988). However, since the human mind is very complex, the results accumulated through any one method of analysis should not be generalized to the entire population. This is pointed out by Banister et al. (1995) who support the use of drawings as a technique to explore the personality of these children, but consider that they should be used in conjunction with other

The second, identified largely in the work of Koppitz (1968), attempted to form and validate the existence of emotional indicators in children’s drawings. The third type has been concerned with the ways in which normal children depict personally important or emotionally significant topics. There have been a number of tests by psychologists all over the world in order to support or deny the role of a drawing in the development process of the child. For example, Gamradt and Staples (1994) called children studying in classes 1-6 to draw on the subject of their school in order to get a better understanding of their school environment. Haney, Rusell and Bebell (2004), used the drawings to explore the child’s perspective of the school and the learning environment. These researchers show how using the drawings made by the children can help not only to understand them but also the learning environment as well as their school better. This can act as a reference tool for the teachers to help make the environment better suited to the child. However, these can’t always be relied upon.

As we can see clearly, using children’s drawings can be beneficial in many ways but do not come without disadvantages and therefore these should be considered before using these drawings to assess the emotional state, perceptions etc of the child. Thus, we can conclude with the understanding that even though these drawings are essential to numerous groups of people to analyse the children’s mental state,