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Analyzing Children’s Art: a Language Forgotten by Adults

Making art is such a natural activity to kids that if a child around six months of age is not interested in playing with crayons, it is considered a danger sign of developmental or psychological status (Levick, 86). Everyone effortlessly made their marks and created art as a kid, but to most people drawing as an activity starts to feel uncomfortable and “childish” as they grow up. Lacanian and Freudian studies reveal a close relationship between children’s developmental stages and their language/art ability development, also providing various interpretations of children’s portrayals of what they have taken in from the world. Children’s limited amount of experience enables them to a more focused and straightforward sublimation—art, more accessible to interpret than those done by adults because they are repressed by the social interpretation of art that is considered good or bad.

The ability to make art develops with the ability to use language as the Symbolic order is composed of both images and words. In childhood development, the language and art skills of a child must match; if a child has verbal capabilities of 9 year old but still draws like a 5 year old, there is a problem. Human language functions differently to that of animals. Deacon categorizes a language with three different logics: icon, index, and symbol. An icon is simply a direct resemblance that does not require any cultural or contextual knowledge, an index is an indicator that is bound to a certain context, and a symbol is a cultural promise that is intertwined within each other to make sense. A moth having a pattern resembling a tree bark is an icon, dogs performing certain actions to receive snacks is an index, and any language that human uses is a symbol (Deacon, 471). While animals use language as icon and index to convey simple emotion, humans’ use of icon and symbol in language requires a child to understand just more than such primitive signs. Lacan’s Symbolic Order distinguishes a linguistic sign with what it actually represents. According to Lacan, a language is merely the Imaginary that does not mean anything by itself. A language acquires its power by generalizing and abstracting concepts from the Real and establishing a cultural promise of representations, acquiring Symbolic meaning. (Bailly, 95) A verbal sound “bed” can be completely meaningless without proper knowledge of certain set of promises; in this case, English. After acquiring such knowledge, one can finally understand that “bed” means a generalized concept of a furniture used for lying down and sleeping. To be able to communicate effectively, one must be able to make sentences with certain promises that, also, do not mean anything without a set of rules called grammar. While the concept of the Real gets properly communicated through the Symbolic, the mental image of such furniture stays abstract in the Imaginary. On top of Symbolic Order, Saussure’s linguistic study establishes a clearer relationship between the represented concept and the representing language: signified and signifier. Signifier is the sound-image that represents the concept, and signified is the represented concept. Even within the same linguistic culture, a signifier is always unique to a creator; everyone speaks a certain word with different voice, writes with different handwriting, and draws with different style. What makes up such vast range of signifiers to a generalized, solidified rules is their mutual differences. (Saussure, 791) Each individual’s unique signifiers that do or do not follow the rules make up The Symbolic in each culture. It may seem contradictory that a generalized representational concept results in individual’s unique expression, but the constant human input to an already established culture is what makes change in the mutual difference, ultimately making changes to their linguistic culture. Consider that a signifier according to Saussure is a sound-“image”; it can not only be a written or spoken word but also be a performance, visual art, or even a sound if there is a certain degree of established linguistic rules. While art is considered a rather peculiar way of communication in a grown up’s world, it is simply another way of expressing themselves in a child’s world. The fact that language and art are both vague, personal, and usually distorted way of communication is often forgotten by adults, resulting in a stronger distinction between the two than that from a child’s perspective. 

Until the age of two, kids are developing motor control and can barely hold drawing utensils. Around six months of age, the kids begin to be aware that what they feel, touch, hear, are not always part of themselves, beginning to develop their ego (Levick, 81). The art produced by them are nothing but a scribble, not aware of the shapes and forms they produce. The mirror stage lets a child realize that their body is separated from the rest of the world; mark-making serves as another activity that lets them realize that they have a préignance to affect the world, much different from controlling their own body (Lacan, 95). Such activities also stimulate development in a child’s motor skill, providing them more control over how they want a mark to look. Art made during this developmental stage depicts the beginning of a child’s ego and their exploration in mark-making, not yet able to convey proper symbol or imagery yet. Not being interested in mark-making can be a warning sign, as it may suggest that a child is not developing their ego, showing no interest in their capability and the change in the world around them.

By the age of three, also called “word-shape stage,” a child starts to learn and repeat words for pleasure and begins to monologue. They slowly learn connections between the signifier and signified by first repeating simple words. As they do so, they will outline forms, recognizing circles and squares. Since they do not understand the connection between the signified and signifier, words and shapes are just fun expressions that they learn to use (Levick, 88). Their art skill level reflects not only their motor development but also their progress in language development. They can distinguish one signifier from another, although not knowing their symbolic meaning nor the cultural significance of them. This is merely a stage where the children explore their  interpretation of the established signifiers, and as they learn more about words and their meanings, their art will begin to resemble real life objects.

By the ages of four to five, children begin to create images with purpose; the shapes will begin to symbolize certain things, and the artworks will begin to tell a story. They are also more capable of speaking out their thoughts and interacting with others verbally. As more children become fluent in using language to communicate, their art also includes more complex narratives (Levick, 96). When children explore language and art, they experiment with the cultural boundaries by trying out things to figure out what is not acceptable and what is. They will learn that they cannot do everything they want in this society, finding out their “real jouissance,” their instinctual desire cannot always be fulfilled, and they will have to compensate the unfulfilled desire by sublimation. For example, they will get scolded for throwing food on the floor, but they will not if they drew it on a paper. The act of filling the gap between real, neurotic, and the fulfilling nature of it, is what children begin to greatly enjoy. They would even verbally or artistically create a fantasy story to compensate for a reality where their actions and desire are limited.

As children become more comfortable with making outlined objects, they will begin to draw things that resemble a human figure. During their earlier stages of development, the figures will have a giant head and tiny or nonexistent body. This may seem like the children’s ego that is yet to realize their fragmented body parts, but it is more affected by the information they take in; they make eye contact with their caregivers and mostly look at their faces. As a result, head naturally becomes the first thing a child draws. It also explains the many large eyes in young children’s drawings (DiLeo, 107). The next step, however, may reflect their struggle to connect their body parts to their ideal ego, as the kids will move on to drawing people with missing or distorted limb. The children become aware of the limbs before they realize their torso, so the early drawings by children often have limbs attached to the head. As children mature and become more aware of the accurate visual representation of human figures, the proportion will become more realistic, with more anatomically proper body parts. 

Another subject matter that is universally popular among children is the house; it represents safety and love, as it’s where the child’s most loved ones live. Freudian interpretation argues that the house also symbolizes femininity, representing womb. Fundamentally, a house is where a child spends most of their early life at, so it can be considered an extension of the womb (DiLeo, 57). No matter where a child lives, they tend to draw a country style house with slanted roof and chimney. This shows that a child’s use of imagery is strongly related to language as a symbol; although what they observe in real-life are houses with various shapes, the symbolic shape of the house comes up to their mind faster than others. Such depiction indicates that children’s drawing is a representation of the visual vocabularies they take in, not a reproduction of actual places. As a child grows older and visits a wider range of places, a predominance of the house in their drawings will decrease and slowly disappear since they are most likely to have found a place of stronger interest. Research shows that about 60 percent of six to seven year old children draw houses in their spontaneous drawings, and by the age of 10 to 11 house only appears in the drawings with other scenery elements like trees, flowers, and sun (DiLeo, 42-44.)

Sublimation is a mechanism where a person’s unacceptable impulses or desires are transformed into more socially acceptable behavior. In a long-term, it can fundamentally make changes to such desires. It is a healthier symptom of repression, as their repressed drive can be relieved without physically committing a socially unacceptable action. Using a language and being creative can often serve as a subliminal action; Dream, for example, is an unconsciousness attempting to set free from the repression of the superego. As the desire gets condensed and displaced with another signifier, the raw impulse can be disguised as a whimsical dream. This process is very similar to that of language usage, as we condense and generalize the metaphors that we are to express and pick a corresponding signifier to communicate. 

The degree of using art as a sublimation of adults and children greatly differs, as a result of experiencing and learning more social rules. One grows up eventually learning “good” art; they see masterpieces from textbooks or galleries and will learn they are considered good within the society. They eventually learn observational drawings in art classes, with drawings that look more realistic getting higher grades. Unlike in their childhood where the adults will praise their artwork no matter what, their art will be looked at, talked about and get graded. As a result, the adult standard of good art becomes those that look more real, and they obsess over reproducing the “Real,” instead of representing or interpreting it. The stylistic aspect of art, however, gets in the way of freely expressing one’s thoughts; they will not draw scenes that they can’t accurately reproduce, limiting themselves into a stylistic vocabulary that they have not fully mastered.  Theoretically, adults can make art as good as children, since their language ability is fully developed and is often better than that of children. However, their ability to use art as a language is limited by the social norms that they have taken in during the several years of life. Making abstract “zen doodles” that some adults do serve as a different kind of sublimation, less related to their language skills. Drawing lines and filling in spaces are skills from the age of 3. An older person doing such activities can suggest that they are anxious about something; preoccupying themselves with such action can serve as a coping mechanism for emotional anxiety. Drawing outlined shapes is a motor control skill that has been mastered earlier, and “filling” the shapes is reminiscent of scribbling. (Levick, 154) Such activity might relieve stress and anxiety, but is not taking advantage of the full language skill that they have. Children, on the other hand, have not experienced such social pressure nor learned the standards of good art; their attitude towards art is purely a joyous, exciting activity that they feel satisfied and will get praised for afterwards. They use their visual vocabulary the same way as they do with their verbal ones, and willingly makes a visual sentence that they want to express, without being afraid of their ability to accurately depict it realistically. The children know “these ‘creations’ are not always understood by those same large and powerful adults, but these adults are always pleased with the children’s artwork”(Levick, 97). Children will pull visual imageries out from their symbolic library that they have acquired, not actual references from real life. The freedom from social rules, the pressure to produce good art and that to get praises from everyone enable children to make use of art the purest way.

The contemporary social structure, in general, makes sublimation difficult for adults. The current society is constructed so that people can use their time the most efficiently. Take social media, for example; one can easily react to another person’s post by clicking “like” button instead of spending time writing a comment, and they can simply copy and paste the same post on different platforms by clicking “share” button without having to retell their story to different people. It takes away the natural action that lets one make use of language and condenses everything with a couple of signifiers. Memes also work in the same way; the popular images that have little to no context get overused often not successfully conveying the actual reaction to the situations. The efficient nature of modern communication can save time and make life easier but is another limitation that prevents people from sublimation. 

Children’s art is very similar to that of artists, as they share the purpose of creation. Children use art as another language that will allow themselves to be free from the rules of family and school, and artists have a feeling or a message to convey through their art. Unlike artists, most adults lose their artistic language as they get surrounded by cultural norms and various premade symbols related to art. Pablo Picasso has once said, “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” We are to embrace our inherent visual language and take advantage of it as a way of sublimation.

Works Cited

Apollon, Willy, et al. After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious. State University of New York Press, 2002.

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: a Beginners Guide. Oneworld, 2013.

Deacon, Terrence William. The Symbolic Species: the Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. International Society for Science and Religion, 2007.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Penguin Books, 1976.

H., DI LEO JOSEPH. INTERPRETING CHILDRENS DRAWINGS. TAYLOR & FRANCIS, 2016.

Levick, Myra F., and Diana S. Wheeler. Mommy, Daddy, Look What Im Saying: What Children Are 

Telling You through Their Art. M. Evans, 1986.

Sullivan, M. E. Ragland, et al. “Ecrits: A Selection.” SubStance, vol. 6, no. 21, 1978, p. 166., doi: