Coloring Outside the Lines: A Mom's POV on Creativity in Kids

Step into my home and you’ll see my family values art—from photographs of Colorado Aspens to folk art (a giant pig with the Southern U.S. painted on its hindquarters, adorning the wall of our dining room) to a collage of a honeybee that incorporates actual honeycomb and beeswax.

The art I treasure most is mixed media from a young local artist, whose creations are bold, inspiring, emotional, and as unique as her tiny fingerprints. The artist is my 2-1/2 year-old daughter, Annie—my husband and I have transformed the largest wall of our kitchen into the Annie Ross Gallery, showcasing her seasonal and non-seasonal work (I feel handprint turkeys deserve more time in the spotlight than a few days in November). My favorite piece is a multi-color snowman, composed of paper plates and cut paper. Known to march to the beat of her own drum, Annie chose to use the purple “hat” as the snowman’s face and the yellow “mittens” upside down and lower on the snowman, as pockets. Perhaps I will tell my friends that this snowman is Annie’s take on René Magritte’s “The Son of Man”. What I do know is this snowman is helping my daughter find her voice.

When we foster creativity in our children, we help them develop mentally, socially, and emotionally, improving fine motor and problem-solving skills. Too often, we praise the finished product and ignore the process. Case in point: I am teaching Annie to bake. When we presented our resident taste tester (my husband) with a recent batch of gingerbread cookies, Annie proclaimed, “I wore my apron just like Mom, and I picked the shapes!” Which, as it turned out, were a cookie cutter star, the letter A, and a sea lion. When baked, the sea lion looked like a brontosaurus. Annie beamed with pride. We praised her for how hard she worked. “Did you have fun baking?” my husband asked.

When we color together, whether it’s on a table-sized sheet of kraft paper or the pages of a coloring book, we promote creativity, hand-eye coordination and early writing skills “Why Should Kids Color? – Team Cartwright.

I love Annie’s color selections and creative process. One of our favorite books to read together is “The Day the Crayons Quit” by Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers (and if you haven’t read it, you should, immediately)—it’s a battle cry for going off script with crayon art.

Kids don’t need a creative brief to express themselves; give them a set of crayons, a canvas (be it a paper plate, a cookie, or a sheet of paper) and some interesting tools, and set them loose to create a masterpiece.

Meg Ross is a writer, creative, and mom