As you enter, the wood floors creak underneath your feet and your immersive art experience begins. Looking around, you notice the range of art pieces across media, some on display, some tucked in unexpected places, and some left informally for interaction with patrons. It is evident that the artist’s work has evolved from rudimentary figures to complex designs and that the diversity of materials shows the experimental nature of the artist’s work. A few pieces are on permanent display, but others are featured with careful curation by the artist. Where is this hidden museum? It is my house. The artist? My ten-year-old daughter.
With a strong arts curriculum in her school and art technique instruction from her teacher, my daughter has been able to develop drawing and painting skills that are now impressive and certainly exceed anything I can do. With an affinity for art, she has acquired lots of supplies—pens, markers, fancy markers, paint markers, markers used by professionals that require a fan on because of the chemical smell, all kinds of paints, drawing pads of various sizes, pastels, chalks, pastel chalks, an easel, and more that I probably don’t know because I have not attended the artist’s lectures of why the material is vital. As a consequence, our house is adorned with marker-on-paper art on the walls and a ten-year-old’s rendition of flowers of varying hues on canvases replacing the purchased artwork my wife and I had used to decorate the house. The truth is some of my daughter’s artwork could blend into many of the shops around town.
Many people would agree that the appreciation of art is subjective. As a parent, your opinion of your children’s art is not subjective. When children are young, every scribble on paper, blob of clay, popsicle-stick-and-glue sculpture, and macaroni necklace are masterpiece works of art and should receive that feedback. Parents learn quickly to not declare what something might be and turn to “tell me about what you made” as means to confirm the children’s artistic intentions. As they grow older, the artwork becomes more identifiable and effortful, making parental critique less tentative.
Art is good for kids—plain and simple. Whether it is drawing, painting, dancing, acting, sculpting, building, sewing—whatever—kids benefit. Certainly, many are aware of how art allows children to express themselves. Drawings of people with happy faces might indicate your child’s overall contentment as much as a picture of dark shapes and scribbles with scary images might indicate something else (or not). The act of creating builds skills and demonstrates complex thinking. When kids engage in art, they use areas of their brain around decision-making and judgment. With each act of selecting a color or design, kids make decisions about what they want the outcome to be. Over time, these small choices and reflections on the resulting product help kids gain confidence in themselves and build those decision-making skills. They can take low-stakes risks in creating art by making a choice, seeing what the outcomes produce, and evaluating the success of their choices. Similarly, creating art helps children with perspective-taking, a challenging skill for children. In the creative act, they have to think about what others might see in their creation. So, take a child acting in a play or dancing in a performance: they have to think about their role and how they interact with the other performers but also about how the audience might experience their character and performance. They have to think about being loud enough, speaking clearly to be understood, and having an expression consistent with their character. Being able to anticipate how others see you and responding to that accordingly requires pretty sophisticated thinking!
Our family regularly takes advantage of the free family days at the local Monterey Museum of Art. The activities planned by the staff are accessible, interesting for all ages, provide instruction in art techniques, and use media for everyone. And as it is family day, I sit side-by-side, and often in collaboration, with my daughter to work on the project at hand. I know that many parents are hesitant to participate, thinking that the activities are just for kids, but they really are for everyone. I would not consider myself particularly artsy or crafty, yet I find engaging in the activities greatly pleasurable, even if my art project does not appear to have been made by an adult. Often, as my daughter engages in the project, she will seek consultation with me on color or a design idea. On occasion, she will see what I am doing and want to collaborate to make the project better, so I concede, and we work together on the art piece. In the process, she negotiates color, directs what needs to be done, articulates her vision, and I provide feedback and support for those choices as well as help navigate the negotiation when I want to go another direction. Sometimes, our collaboration results in better art and, sometimes, we agree that the product can be sacrificed. But the process of working together builds our relationship.
Like many parents, the accumulated art of my daughter have become part of the home archives (i.e., a plastic bin in the garage). Every once in a while, she and I go through and curate what needs to stay and what does not. I know that I should probably dispose of half or more of the accumulated pieces, but as a parent, I feel like I am going to value a retrospective exhibit of her childhood artwork as she gets older more than she will.
Leave a Reply