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When the weather’s bad and there’s no prospect of a trip to the park, we might well reach for crayons, pencils and paper as a way to keep our children entertained. But drawing is much more than a fun activity. It has wide-ranging benefits for children’s development.

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, and drawing allows children to explore, build on and record their own creative and imaginative ideas.

Drawing also allows children to express themselves and communicate to others. A child can experience again a happy event through images, such as a birthday party, or draw out some sad feelings as a therapeutic exercise to help with an event such as losing a loved one. Drawing is an important medium in child art therapy. It provides a non-verbal way to communicate the wide range of emotions and difficulties in their behavior they might be struggling with.

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 has been found to improve children’s memory of events that happened a year earlier.

Parents can also help, since encouragement to draw is also important. Spending time sitting with your child while they draw, maybe chatting with them is another way to engage them in the activity. 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.

^{(Richard Jolley e Sarah Rose. www.theconversation.com, 13.04.2023. Adaptado.)}