Brief Report
A new theory on children's drawings: Analyzing the role of emotion and movement in graphical development

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2015.02.009Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We analyzed scribbling and discovered a clear intention behind young children's gestures.

  • We reassessed scribbling as a vital part of cognitive and emotional development.

  • We traced the evolution of the line as a tool that is used to communicate feelings and intentions.

  • Our results show that there is still much to be learned about meaning-creation and representation in infant behavior.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to develop a new understanding of children's drawings and to provide ideas for future research in early childhood. Starting from classic theories on child graphical development, we proceed to analyze them and provide our own views on the subject. We will also recount a number of relevant empirical studies that appear to validate our theory. Our belief is that emotion and self-expression through movement play a key role in the development of child art, and that this may be already visible during the scribbling stage of drawing.

Section snippets

The realistic perspective

The first researchers of child art concentrated on comparing children's productions to adult ones, and on wondering why the former were riddled with errors. Any misplacement was seen as proof that the child was not mature enough to reproduce reality correctly. Jean Piaget was among the first to study child art from a scientific point of view. He found that his four-stage developmental model (Piaget, 1929) could be applied to drawings, as well, and that children had an almost parallel

The artistic perspective

Lowenfeld (1952) was the author who gave the most detailed account on child art in relation to artistic expression. He believed that children's general development was linked with their creative development as well (Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1947).

The artistic approach moves the scholar's attention from “what” children are drawing to “how” they are drawing, that is, to the resources elaborated during the act of creation. According to this perspective, the object of study shifts from the graphical

The esthetic perspective

Kellogg, 1955, Kellogg, 1969 was partially influenced by Arnheim's work. Kellogg believed that the search for order and proportion was the basic principle for the disposition of figurative units into complex combinations. The scholar noted that, between the numerous scribbles, diagrams and combinations that children experiment with, the units that appeared more frequently were those that possessed good visual form or proportion. Kellogg considered these forms of visual order attractive by

The scribbling stage

Early graphical activity is often considered a mere consequence of the gesture (Papandreou, 2014, Wallon, 1950), but we believe that it is something more than a random act; we see it as something that can be exchanged inside a relationship, a way of communicating (Quaglia & Saglione, 1976). Like any activity that is essential to a child's development, drawing is generated and thrives inside a relationship that is emotionally rich and stimulating. The pleasure of creating traces would soon

Conclusions

In this paper, we have reported and analyzed the most relevant theories on child graphical development, adding our personal interpretation of this phenomenon. Overall, children have a desire to realize themselves, and do so by employing all the tools they have in their possession. They have the necessary resources, at every level of development, to recreate their own existence on paper in a satisfying manner; adults need only to appreciate and support whatever children decide to create. As

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