Let’s say you’ve read previous posts about the importance of voicing your child’s emotions to your child and you want to try it out. So, when your young child gets mad and throws his shoebox full of crayons about his room, you calmly voice how he seems angry, or perhaps sad, too. But hearing this, he falls apart, screaming, throwing more things, and moving into a wicked meltdown.
You tell yourself you did everything right: you were calm, empathetic, kind, and so on. And yet, he melts down. It seems that talking about feelings is too much for him. How then are you supposed to get at feelings without overwhelming your child?
This is a question that therapists are always dealing with, whether we’re working with kids or adults. If we approach intense feelings—especially ones that are traumatic or triggering—too directly, it feels too intense, overwhelming, or even traumatizing.
The solution is to approach these feelings indirectly, and one good way with children is to draw. (And check out the related post, “Talking About Hard Subjects: Using an Indirect Approach.”)
Why drawing works
When a child draws, she can project her feelings onto the picture so that the picture and its characters have the feelings, not the child. This allows her to more safely express her fears, her emotional struggles, and her fantasies (i.e. the things she wants).
For example, she can make the toy car be angry, or the doll miss its family, or the lion sit in time out. This helps not just because she’s expressing her feelings but she can imagine ridding herself of these feelings by giving them to someone or something else. Additionally, through this other object, she can sample and work towards mastering the difficult feeling.
(For more on projection and play, see the post, “Kids and Play: What’s Really Going On.”)
Getting them to draw: some basic guidelines
The goal here isn’t for your child to draw realistically. This isn’t a class in artistic realism, and in fact, reality isn’t the point at all. You are trying to encourage your child to express feelings, and feelings are often not based in reality. The drawing is simply a vehicle for your child to tell a story that contains her emotions. It’s story you’re after.
Here are a few guidelines:
1. Be non-directive. Borrowing from the principles of play therapy, it’s best not to impose or interfere with the child’s spontaneous expressions of feelings. Parents should play the role of observer, and should withhold opinions and judgments.
2. Provide basic materials. Start with a blank piece of unlined paper. As for what to draw with, you can provide crayons, markers, colored pencils, or simply a Bic pen. While the goal is to encourage the child to create a picture that tells a story—as opposed to making a pretty, colorful picture—kids love to color, so let them color away!
3. Give a prompt. Here you have two options:
a. Be non-directive: tell your child to draw anything she wants. This allows her to be fully inventive and expressive.
b. Direct your child towards a specific issue. This can be helpful when you want to explore how a child feels about specific, defined subjects. For example, if a child is feeling anxious about an upcoming medical procedure, you could ask her to draw the procedure as she imagines it. Or, if she’s nervous about flying, ask her to draw something that involves her flying. Give her as much room as possible to impose her vision and her version of things onto the drawing.
4. Watch her draw. Keep in mind that all subjects are okay to draw, and all feelings are valid to express—even when your child draws a picture of her newborn sister with her head cut off. As for what you do while she draws, here’s another two options:
It’s perfectly fine to simply watch and wait until she’s done drawing.
You can ask clarifying questions as she’s drawing to better understand what something is or what’s happening or how someone is feeling. It’s a time only to gather information. Be careful not to direct how your child draws or hint at any reactions you might have to what she says or draws.
5. Get the story. When she’s done, ask her, “So, what’s going on in the picture?” She may need a little help here. If she points and says only, “That’s me. That’s the doctor,” you can then prod, “And what happens? What’s the story?” If she says she doesn’t know, ask her to make up one.
Interpreting the drawing
Making sense of a child’s drawing takes some professional training and experience, but parents can still make use of the picture despite not being a play therapist.
You are asking your child to draw so that you can elicit a story. The story gives you access to your child’s emotions which she’s projecting onto the drawing with its characters. (Check out the corresponding short-short story, “The Jail and the Storm,” that shows how a father does just this.)
After your child tells you the story associated with the picture, ask further questions to fill out the picture’s details:
- Ask how the characters in the picture are feeling, and how they got those feelings.
- Ask why the characters are doing what they’re doing.
- Ask what the characters would say if they could speak.
- Ask what the characters want, whether they’ll be able to get it, and why or why not.
- Ask how your child imagines the story in the picture would continue to play out if the picture became unfrozen and turned into a movie. What would happen in a few minutes, hours, and days?
It’s also important to note what is missing from the picture that you might expect to see.
For example, if the child who is anxious about flying draws herself and the other passengers staring out the windows of a plane, yet the cockpit she added is noticeably empty of a face, this likely has some meaning: no one seems to be in charge of flying the plane.
Here’s another example. Let’s say a six-year-old draws a picture of herself and her teddy bear playing in the yard. When you ask for the story, she says, “Me and Bear are playing. Then it’s dinner time so we go inside and eat cookies, then we watch TV, read a book, and go to bed.”
Her vision of home life—of playing, dinner, and bedtime—lacks others. Where is everyone, you might wonder. Is this a story about feeling lonely, alone, or abandoned? On the other hand, could it be about self-sufficiency and independence?
When asked she might tell you that the girl is happy, but that the Bear misses his Momma Bear. Now we have something that points us in a clear direction: the stuffy missing his momma. There’s projection here. Rather than project sadness and isolation onto the girl in the picture, the drawer projects it onto the bear which is one step further removed from the human having this feeling. It will be helpful to ask more questions about where the Momma Bear went, what helps Bear’s sadness, and the role the girl has in the story.
Generally, as you round out the story, you will probably find certain emotions running through the tale. It may be helpful to ask yourself what the main emotions are. For young children, they tend to be: anger, sadness, loss, separation, fear, confusion, guilt, shame, and helplessness. Or their opposites: joy, reunion, closeness, connection, feeling protected, feeling forgiven, and feeling big, powerful, and competent.
Voicing the feelings
In the end, this is what you’re really after: helping your young child understand the feelings that are coursing through her. While you could voice her feelings that are driving the drawing (for more on this, see “Voicing Your Child’s Emotions: the Direct Approach”), this may be too direct for your child. Instead, you can stay within the drawing and talk about how the characters seem to be feeling. It could sound like, “Bear’s Momma is always hunting, so Bear misses her and feels sad. It seems like there’s not much Bear can do. But the girl helps take care of Bear. I wonder if that’s enough or if Bear still feels sad.”
If you feel your child can tolerate a slightly more direct approach, you can link the drawing to her own emotions at a later time. It could sound something like this: “You seem sad that I have to work and can’t make cookies right now. Sort of like Bear missing his Momma in your drawing.”
The key here is to duck in and duck out; you want to make talking about feelings tolerable and normal so that your child learns to not just identify her feelings, but to trust that she can handle them.
Related Posts
Voicing Your Child’s Emotions: the Direct Approach
Talking to kids about their feelings is one of the most important yet challenging jobs for parents. Here’s how to make it a lot easier.
The Jail and the Storm
In this story, a father “draws out” some important feelings in his son and himself.
Kids and Play: What’s Really Going On
The real meaning behind a child’s play: to express and vent feelings. Figuring out their play helps parents better understand their child.
