Chinese children love to say \”I can\’t draw\”, maybe this is the reason!

I remember when Maodou was less than 2 and a half years old, I once said to him: \”You like cars so much, then draw a car!\” As a result, Maodou looked at me blankly and said, \”I can\’t draw.\” .\” I was surprised. Maodou\’s standard Chinese child-style \”I can\’t draw\” made me suddenly realize what we were missing in art education. I remembered something I had experienced. When I went to the United States to give birth to my baby in 2013, I wandered around the community library when I had nothing to do. The children there ranged from three or four to five or six years old, and all of them were holding paintbrushes and looking serious. smear on paper. I clearly remember the confident look on his face when I asked a landlord’s neighbor’s child, a 3-year-old boy about the same age as Edamame, if he wanted to draw a car. With a few strokes, he drew a strange shape on the paper. It was neither a circle nor a square, with two protruding corners. Judging from the aesthetics of Chinese adults, this must be a mess and cannot be called a car at all. But the boy proudly introduced me: \”This is my car!\” At that time, I didn\’t know much about how to educate children in art, so I pointed to the messy lines on the paper and asked him, \”But this is not Car, have you seen it? It doesn’t look like a car at all.” (Every Chinese parent will say this, right?) Who knows a few days later, the landlord and neighbor came to visit us and expressed their gratitude to us very politely but bluntly. views on this matter. This highly educated, tall white woman said to me politely: \”You know what? I like the expression of my son Bill. As for whether the painting is similar, whether it is consistent with the copy, and It’s not what I want.” “Children’s painting does not originally perform the same function as a copy machine. When children paint, they actually integrate their experience into the painting. Every detail is only related to their experience. It has nothing to do with whether the painting looks like it or not. In the painting that Bill drew in the library, he used straight lines to represent the wheels. I think that is very cool! Because in his thinking, this is how the wheels work. I want to respect Him.\” The landlord winked at me, meaning: \”Don\’t educate other people\’s children if they don\’t understand. Old Americans are very taboo about this.\” This is the first time that my old concept of artistic enlightenment has been dissed, but I think this Yes, the Americans are right. After returning to China, I again engaged in work related to children\’s education. I have been observing my own children\’s edamame paintings for a long time. I have also visited dozens of kindergartens in Beijing and nearly a hundred kindergartens across the country, and have been a kindergarten teacher for several months. It\’s strange. In the kindergartens I\’ve been to, what I heard the most is really the sentence \”I can\’t draw.\” And there is also such a rule: the more kindergartens hold art classes, or children Children who have participated in art classes are more likely to say this sentence. For example, in an art class, those children have learned how to draw a kite, how to draw the sky, and how to draw the sun. If you say to them: \”Then, let\’s draw a sandstorm sky!\” they will easily raise their heads and look at you blankly: \”I can\’t draw.\”On the contrary, the more kindergartens or families support children\’s free creative environment such as graffiti, scribbling, flicking pens, and adding paint on their own, the less likely children will say such words as \”I can\’t draw.\” The child will happily show you the pictures in his mind. Why is this so? A very reputable art educator I learned said this: If a child always says \”I can\’t draw\”, the most likely reason is wrong criticism from parents. Many parents like to regard \”paintings exactly the same\” as the high standard of art, but the worlds of children and adults are completely different. There is no clear distinction between right and wrong in a child\’s world. Everything he draws is an expression of the child. Many parents like to criticize their children’s paintings for “not looking like it” or “not being good enough”, or giving demonstrations of painting to their children (this is actually very dangerous, so be careful). A child of a few years old has no ability to judge. He takes the words of his parents as his golden words. How can he know that \”painted images\” are one of the lowest realms of art. Children are always asked to \”draw like\” by their parents, and children forget that painting is a way to freely express their inner experience. Once children face things they have never painted before, they will easily adopt an evasive attitude of \”I can\’t draw.\” Also, parents are used to drawing something for their children first, and then asking the children to follow the drawing or trace it. This is also a form of wasting children\’s artistic talent. Once children get used to copying or imitating something, once they have no reference, they feel that they can\’t create anything. To sum up, these two habits of parents: praising their children for their \”paintings\” and asking their children to copy other paintings are important reasons for children to get used to saying \”I can\’t draw\”. If you want your child to become a little artist and protect your child\’s artistic imagination from being destroyed by stereotypes, the first thing is to allow your child to express freely: painting is actually the child speaking his or her inner thoughts. One sentence can light up a child\’s artistic life, or one sentence can destroy a painting genius. The key depends on how you say it. Never say to your children, “What you drew looks nothing like it”!