Children benefit from drawing. How you can help

Most children love to draw and this simple pastime holds benefits for their healthy development, including memory and learning. Richard Jolley and Sarah Rose shared some insights in The Conversation.

Drawing allows children to take their experiences of the world and transform these by making new connections and relationships through their inventive minds. Their knowledge, memories and fantasies all feed their imagination. By drawing, children can explore, build on and record their own creative and imaginative ideas.

Communicate and learn

Drawing also allows children to express themselves and communicate to others. A child can relive a happy event, or draw out some feelings to help process a sad event. Child art therapy provides a non-verbal way to communicate the wide range of emotional and behavioural difficulties children might be struggling with, to lead to change and growth.

Drawing can help children learn. Research shows that using drawing as a teaching activity can increase children’s understanding in other areas, such as science. A group of children were taught two strategies to help them learn a scientific concept. One strategy involved sketching out ideas and the other did not. Among the students who performed each strategy well, those who used drawing had a better understanding of the topic.

What’s more, drawing may also help improve children’s memory. Research has found that children give more information about a previously experienced event when they are asked to draw about it while talking about it.

Drawing is also an exercise in problem-solving, as children try to produce a two-dimensional image that stands for an object or scene from a three-dimensional world. With age, practice and instruction children typically produce increasingly visually realistic representations of the subject matter. In this process children are experimenting with different lines, shapes, spatial alignment and proportions.

How parents can help

First of all, we can help our children draw and learn through drawing by simply giving them the materials and the time to use them.

Encouragement to draw is also important. An Arts Council England report found that many children do not receive encouragement to take part in arts activities, but that those children who did were more likely to engage in the arts as adults. This suggests that encouragement may be important, not just for current engagement, but also to benefiting in the future from engaging in art.

You could also try spending time sitting with your child while they draw, perhaps chatting with them. If you are chatty and supportive children are likely to find it encouraging. We carried out research to find out about what affected children’s experiences of drawing. We found that children whose parents spent longer with them while they drew took more enjoyment from their drawing.

Psychologists working with children often ask them to draw. Parents may find drawing a useful way to gain greater insight into their children’s experiences and personal reflections.

Or, draw alongside your child. Research has shown that children often use drawings made by others, such as cartoons or drawings by their parents or siblings, as inspiration for their own drawings. Our research found that children most value being given a demonstration of drawing as support for their own drawing. Drawing with your child or collaborating on a shared drawing may provide them with inspiration.

Creating geometrical designs and patterns is often promoted as an effective means of developing children’s drawing skill, fine motor control and hand-eye coordination. Doodling can be lots of fun too and has been linked with children‘s increased creativity and imagination and learning.

What’s more, doodling has been found to improve recall in adults who listened to a monotonous telephone message. You could set your child an example and doodle together.

You can also introduce your child to a range of drawing styles. Children may be inspired by a particular artistic style and this may provide them with an opportunity to develop their drawing skill and make sense of the world around them. Perhaps borrow some comic books from the library to inspire them. You might even want to get involved—and learn to draw in a different way together.

Content provided by The Conversation

Above image courtesy of Freepik

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.