How To Decode Your Children's Drawings? Explains Graphologist

Handwriting Analysis Expert shares tips on how parents can decode their children's drawings.

A drawing by a child is not a mere combination of pencil strokes and hues but has more to say about how they feel, what they see as their goals, how they want to live, or how the environment around them is. Observing your child's drawing lets, you understand their personality better over a while. Renowned Graphologist and Handwriting Analysis Expert Sudhir Kove shares tips on how parents can decode their children's drawings.

Their handmade drawings are more than just scribbled lines and caricatures that give a window to your child's personality, fears, joys, dreams, and hopes. From the colours that they use to how they stroke the paper/ canvas with their pencils and crayons, it can help you dive deeper into observing how they are learning and developing while being influenced by the external environment, such as the people that they are with, the media that they watch, their parents' behaviour, etc. Decoding their drawings is again an art as children are in a state of development year after year; hence, their illustrations have something new to show as they grow. You should stop, gaze, and observe the pictures but not decipher them yourself. Communicate with them. Conversing with them to help them surface their thoughts is the need to understand their psyche.

Here's how you can understand their drawings to understand what influences them and what they want to become.

Understand The Colours They Use

• A common understanding is that red is an attractive colour for children, and they often use it to depict their emotions. From showcasing rage to love, hues of red can be used by the kids to showcase their feeling of awe or if something annoys them. They may draw a gift ribbon with a bright red colour to showcase that behind the ribbon is a gift box that opens only to a lovely gift.
• On the contrary, you may witness them drawing a brick wall with maroon-coloured blocks, which may showcase their feeling of being less vocal, introverted behaviour, etc. If your child frequently uses pastel colours instead of bright and bold hues, they may try to bring their shy side to the surface. Using too many colours in a painting may present the child's outgoing and friendly nature.

Observe How And What They Draw

If they are drawing a spiral, see how they draw it. If they start from inward and follow their pencil's way outward, it depicts that they are visionaries who can pave their way when faced with adversities. However, if they draw it outwards to inward, they may deal with ambiguous situations without seeing a way out of hardships.

• Seeing a drawing of a house is easy to understand how they see their life and lifestyle to be. If they are drawing home in the vicinity of a river, with fields of crops beside it and only one house, it showcases their willingness to have a sustainable life in the countryside. If they draw buildings and roads crowded with vehicles, it showcases that they crave to thrive in the fast-paced world. A house with many windows shows room for light and positive energy. A home with no windows showcases reserved behaviour and not showcasing its best side to the world.
• By and large, a significant influence on the drawing is not prolonged but only short-term emotions. Various research studies trying to understand children's psyche from their drawings noted that a child barely shows consistency in a picture. They may be sad one day and hence use dark and dull colours, whereas the next day, they might be drawing a lush tree bearing bright red apples, showcasing hope and a fruitful day. Instead of jumping to conclusions, parents must be patient and colloquial and try to witness underlying symptoms within the child.