Home / Environment / Do Coloring Books Stifle Kids’ Creativity?
Encouraging creativity and independent thinking is an important part of early childhood education. Yet many of the most popular toys and pastimes suggested for children actively discourage these developments. One of the most innocent-seeming culprits here is the coloring book, which parents have turned to time and again to keep kids occupied quietly for an hour or two. Turns out that coloring books might be equally detrimental to a child’s creative growth as watching television.
Television is actually an apt comparison. There are certainly television shows that educate or otherwise engage children, and many children’s programs are getting much better at encouraging creativity and active participation among their viewers. Overall, though, television tells kids that they don’t need to think for themselves or come up with new ways of solving problems – after all, the characters will figure it out all on their own.
Similarly, coloring books tell kids that there is a right and a wrong way to draw a house, a dragon, or a human being. They show an idealized picture of any given shape and the child remembers that this shape appears the same way in all their coloring books. The next time your child is asked to draw a picture of a princess, they’re likely to give their princess the same attributes as the picture they saw in their coloring book: same crown, same color dress, same hair.
They can also become frustrated with their own undeveloped skills as artists. They can see the difference between their own drawings and the “grown-up” drawings in the coloring books, and they may be discouraged from drawing their own pictures at all. As they get older, they’re more likely to impose restrictions on themselves when filling in coloring books, too, insisting that they stay within the lines and color everything the “right” colors.
You can see the progression as children lose creativity in their engagement with coloring books by watching very small children. They color gleefully outside the lines, seeming often not even to notice that there is a drawing underneath. They like to see the color, and they’re willing to make whatever shapes with that color seem appropriate to them. As they grow older, they try to stay within the lines more, and they may have garnered opinions on the “right” colors: dragons are always green, the sky is always blue.
So what to do instead? Give your child a blank piece of paper and a bunch of crayons or colored pencils and prompt them to create their own picture. Be sure to engage their imagination by not just encouraging them to draw something they’ve seen: “Can you draw a picture of the park we saw today?” but also things they can only create in their heads: “If you could make your very own park, what would it look like? Can you draw me a picture of it?”
For early childhood education programs that foster creativity and encourage independent thinking for your child, look into Discovery School and Camp in West Chester, PA.
