Creative Kids
A parenting hack for purging preschool art without guilt
Last weekend’s Kick-Ass Heroines Substack post was about my house edit and the two weeks of cleaning, organizing, redecorating, and removing that happened in my kids’ bedrooms. It brought to mind something that I started doing when my oldest was in preschool, and I realized that my kid art hack belonged here, as a parenting survival skill.
Preschool is amazing. Preschool teachers are among the kindest, gentlest people on the planet who have made it their mission to teach toddlers to love school. It’s literally the point of preschool – not to be day care, or even a place to socialize (although that’s a big part of it), but rather a place to learn to love learning.
A big part of learning, maybe even the biggest, is the fostering of curiosity, which teaches children to explore the world around them, to ask questions, and to seek answers. Just as important to the quality of a child’s education is the exploration of creativity – why do we do things this way? Can we think outside the box? What happens when you mix blue with red? Why do finger paints and Playdoh feel so good? The obvious place to begin a child’s journey with curiosity is in nature and books, and just as obviously, the fostering of creativity happens through play and art. Art for a 3 or 4 year old doesn’t just happen with finger paint, although there’s A LOT of finger painting. It can be made with string and tongue depressors, with glue and Playdoh and rocks and crayons. Art is what happens when you give a kid a medium and maybe a direction (though directions are much more about suggestions than rules), and then see what happens.
As a parent, I can say with 100% certainty that the best preschool days were the ones with conversations at pick-up that begin with “LOOK WHAT I MADE!!!”
The first few drawings and paintings went up on the refrigerator or bulletin board. One or two got framed – I’ve always been a fan of thrift store frames and gold or black spray paint in groupings of three or five on a wall dedicated to kid art – and family drawings might have made it onto a holiday card. But as the year(s) went on, and our children’s painting and drawing and gluing creativity was thoroughly explored, the amount of artwork became overwhelming.
So, at the end of every school year, I gathered every drawing, painting, sculpture, and craft, and laid them out on the dining table to photograph with my phone, one by one or group by group, until everything was documented. Then I tucked my favorites into frames in the hall, invited my kids to pick a favorite or two for the frames in their room, and then I loaded the images into a digital photo book program (Shutterfly was easy) and made a photobook for each kid, complete with their school picture, year in school, and the date. The photo books gave me permission to discard the physical art, and were a much simpler way to keep track of the hundreds of bits of paper that could accumulate in a school year.
I’ve asked my 17 and 21 year old kids about those photo books, and neither one is particularly interested in looking back through them, but both say they’re happy not to have the clutter of a bunch of preschool and elementary school art to deal with. Someday, if they have their own kids, they might revisit the books, but mostly they’re for me – primarily as an antidote to guilt for having thrown away my kids’ artworks, but also as a reminder of two small children so full of curiosity and creativity that a finger-painted rainbow was all a day needed to be great.