Therapeutic Value of Drawing

"For many kids, drawing is exhilarating not because of the final product it leads to, but because they can live completely in the world of their drawing for a few minutes (and then promptly forget about it a few minutes later). Adults may find it hard to relate to this sort of full-body, fleeting experience. But the opportunities for self-expression that drawing provide have important, even therapeutic, value for kids.

Even simple scribbles are meaningful. While it was once thought that kids only scribbled to experience the physical sensation of moving their arm along the page, 'now it’s been shown that when children are scribbling ... they're representing through action, not through pictures,' said [Ellen Winner, a psychology professor at Boston College who also works with Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero, a research group that focuses on arts education]. 'For example, a child might draw a truck by making a line fast across the page and going ‘zoom, zoom,’ and so it doesn’t look like a truck when the child is done, but if you watch the process, what the child says and the noises and motion he makes when he’s drawing, you can see that he is trying to represent a truck through action,' she said. 'And in a way you have drawing fused with symbolic play.'"

Source: “The Hidden Meaning of Kids’ Shapes and Scribbles,” by Isabel Fattal, October 25, 2017, The Atlantic

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