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ESTHER BURKITT on whether those pictures stuck to the fridge are really a window to a child's mind.
IMAGINE a child runs up to you full of excitement, thrusting a drawing into your hands. You see two giant figures, coloured in murky shades of browns and greys, apparently fighting. Would you conclude that the child is really trying to show you that they are upset about the figures in their drawing? Or could it be that this child loves the colours they used, and feels so positively about the people in the picture that their size has been exaggerated out of all proportion?
When we look at a child's drawing we may see a collection of scribbles, or a clear representation of reality. We may simply enjoy the range of shapes and colours before us, or we may look for personal meaning Io the child artist or to ourselves. And meaning may or may not be there: children's drawings fulfil a variety of puiposes (Thomas & Silk, 1990). Children draw to decorate a wall or simply to bring pleasure to themselves and the viewer; but they also draw to express feelings, to show others how they feel about people and objects in their lives.
At least by the late 1930s, as seen in the work of Lowenfeld (1939, 1947), some researchers were coming round to the idea that children's drawings were not just representations from life that varied in realism (see Luquet, 1927) or served as measures of intelligence (Goodenough, 1926). The drawing of a human figure, in particular, began to be regarded as a way in which children expressed something about themselves. This 'body-image' assumption laid the base of formal tests of the child's personality (The Machover Draw-a-Person Test: Machover, 1951) and current emotional state (Koppitz, 1968). Other tests, such as the Kinetic Family Drawing Test and the House-Tree-Person test, claimed to measure how children felt about the topics in the drawing and their wider environment. Unfortunately, research studies assessing the reliability and validity of these tests fell short of what was needed for them to be trusted (Swenson, 1968; Thomas & Jolley, 1998).
However, recent research is beginning to provide evidence that children's feelings do come out in their drawings. Children may...