Child Development: How Art can Help Children Develop through More Creative Pathways, Including Coping with Divorce

The school system is failing our youth. I don’t mean that they aren’t watching out for them, I mean that the curriculum that they set forward for the students to follow isn’t doing the new generations justice. Many kids can walk out of high school with straight A’s, but that doesn’t mean that they developed their full potential. The schools are more concerned with budget cuts and how much things will cost them than making sure children are growing up with important skills that the art department could give them.  Art may also help children understand and cope with things like divorce and family issues by giving them an outlet to express what they think and feel, to come to a conclusion, and a way to cope. Art can give them a way to try and make sense of the world, inside and outside of the classroom, the outlet that they need to solve problems, think critically, and even convey certain ideas.

Child development in the current generation is something that many parents and some school professionals take very seriously. This study conducted by Tiina Kukkonen, who has a BFA in Art Education and an MA in Child Studies, and Sandra Chang-Kredl, who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at Concordia University, looked into the use of drawing as a way to get the children to play with one another and how the children interact and help build meaning through the use of art. The study took preschoolers, between the ages of 4 and 5, and had them participate in a group drawing activity. They noted that “the children had expressed knowledge of nature and other objects, which allowed them to initiate and build on common themes.” (Kukkonen/Chang-Kredl, 3). The children being able to build common themes show that the use of group art can help solidify previous knowledge and even facilitate new learning. Children, even at a young age, understand parts of the world around them and can use art to their advantage to show and develop further their thoughts and understandings.

Mark Drawing a Beehive in a Tree

Certain children started to draw a beehive and a tree showing that they understand that the “beehouse” goes in a tree and solidifying this by confirming what is was, “I did a beehouse. I did a bee …I did a beehive.” They continued this theme of bees and started to make buzzing noises and flap their hands. From this one observation, it shows how their common knowledge of bees and where they live and how they act. It also allows the children to develop a common knowledge with others and engage in the group art play. The Art gave them an outlet to relax with school stressors; and at the same time helped them further their knowledge. This is the exact reason why I think that they should implement more art into the schools curriculum. This won’t be only beneficial to children in preschool, but also in older children, helping them to solidify concepts and create more understandings.

The curriculum in schools ignore the fact that at the end of the day, the individuals that they are teaching are kids who are just trying to cope with stressors and understand the world for themselves. Yo-Yo Ma, in his article Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy, and Education, talks about how “In our industrialized societies there is a great deal of controversy these days over what life is and when it begins and how we approach the agony of death which, in industrial society, we try to avoid thinking about it… the arts help us cope with these issues by engaging, not avoiding.” His point is very accurate. Kids nowadays aren’t taught how to understand the most common concepts; life and death. When he talks about how art helps us cope, he is correct. Yo-Yo Ma goes on to say “Only then can we regain our spiritual balance and find meaning in more than trying to technically manage every aspect of our being from womb to tomb.” When he brings this up, it makes me think that art can bring creative and fluid thinking to all aspects of education, but especially to help with the understanding and comprehension of things like life and death. This kind of upfront learning and using art to help the thoughts develop would be beneficial to the growing generations because it advances their knowledge quicker and helps them better understand complicated parts of life. For some children, the complicated parts of life are having their parents separated. 

Being a child born into a divorced family, I can relate to some of the struggles that many children go through. I have been in therapy since I was 5, and my therapist noticed that the best way to help me cope and grow through my issues was drawing. I would sit with her with a white board and just draw as we talked about my life and my parents. As I got older I didn’t need to go to therapy as much, this being said I knew that drawing, painting, or just doodling would help me through tough times. Having art be a part of my life helped me cope with stress from school and anxiety from my parents fighting, and just being a thing to do when I needed to relax. I think that having art be taken more seriously and becoming an important part of the curriculum would help so many kids now a days, especially since divorce among parents has become very prominent. 

“I would sit with her with a white board and just draw as we talked about my life and my parents.”

Zoe Barrett

The idea that education should reach into including the arts into our schools curriculum is favored by many, but some parents and teachers also disagree, along with the board of education. Back in my home town of Fairfield, Connecticut, there have been many budget cuts in the funding for art and music programs. They even threatened to take away the music classes, which so many students are a part of and claim that that is the part of the day that they look forward to the most. Many students are dealing with divorce in their families, and many of them enjoy the outlet of the arts to help with the stress of home life. The school boards don’t think about this when looking at budgeting and creating the curriculum. The school boards are required to follow the Common Core Standards; the standards say nothing about the arts program in it, making the art department the first thing to go when money gets tight. The Common Core standards also has a scoring process which determines budgeting, the schools will cut art classes to make their scores higher to get the most of the budget. These schools also take into consideration the No Child Left Behind Act of 2015. This act says that children must be tested between the grades of 3 to 8 and once in high school to make sure they are keeping up with the rest of the class. This act would help so many children get the correct structure in the sense that they can walk out of high school with the necessary knowledge. But since these tests only test reading, writing, and math, schools tend to cut arts out of the children’s schedule if they are falling behind. This leaves kids who are struggling in core classes not able to participate in the arts, that could help them cope with home life, and therefore create a better environment for them to succeed in other classes. The arts evoke creativity and thinking outside of the box. I don’t want our next generations of children to walk out of high school missing that opportunity, do you? Art not only will help our newer generations become more well rounded individuals, it will also help them cope with something that many children have to deal with nowadays, divorce.

Children with divorced parents tend to struggle in many areas throughout their life. They are more likely to have impacted relationships, and are more prone to having psychological consequences. They also tend to score lower in academic achievement. There was a study done by Sheala Morrison, Stephen Fife, and Katherine Hertlein, where they interviewed 10 adults who were younger than 18 when their parents got divorced, and talked about the long lasting effects that they have noticed that affect their own relationships and other effects that they noticed. They noticed that many children from divorced families grow up to have confidence issues and a harder time opening up because of the fear of being rejected. I think that the best way to help children in divorced families from growing up with these negative effects would having them be apart of an art program, or at least have them involved in a type of art program. This would make the lives of the children affected so much better, it definitely made mine better.

Work Cited 

Kukkonen, T., & Chang-Kredl, S. (2017). Drawing as Social Play: Shared Meaning-Making in Young Children’s Collective Drawing Activities. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 37(1), 74–87. https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12116

‌Sheala C. Morrison, Stephen T. Fife & Katherine M. Hertlein (2017) Mechanisms behind Prolonged Effects of Parental Divorce: A Phenomenological Study, Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, 58:1, 44-63, DOI: 10.1080/10502556.2016.1262652

Lehrer, Jonah. “The Future of Science… Is Art?” SEED Magazine, 16 Jan. 2008, daniellevitin.com/levitinlab/printmedia/2008-The_Future-Seed_Magazine.pdf.

Ma, Yo-Yo. “Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy, and Education.” Emerging Contemporary Readings for Writers, edited by Barclay Barrios, 3rd ed, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016, pp257-261.

Kukkonen, Tiina, and Sandra Chang-Kredl. “Child’s Drawing of a Tree and Beehive,” Drawing as Social Play: Shared Meaning‐Making in Young Children’s Collective Drawing Activities, 2017.

Shoemaker, Deb. “Art Therapy Activities : Art Therapy Activities to Deal With Divorce.” YouTube, 13 Nov. 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGGrXqZtkXE