It seems you can’t open a magazine these days without reading
about a new way to analyze your children. I usually skip those
articles since I don’t see any point to know ahead of time that my
child may have an inherent character flaw and will grow up to be an
antisocial, psychopathic mass murder.
It seems you can’t open a magazine these days without reading about a new way to analyze your children. I usually skip those articles since I don’t see any point to know ahead of time that my child may have an inherent character flaw and will grow up to be an antisocial, psychopathic mass murder. I’d much rather be surprised.
But one recent day I was in a doctor’s office, reading a dog-eared parenting magazine and came across an article about deciphering a preschooler’s artwork to alert parents to potentially dangerous situations. Now, my daughter is a young teenager and my son soon will be, so I really had no business reading the article, and besides, deepdown I know that a bunch of crayon scribbles can’t tell you whether to start saving for your son’s college tuition or prison bail, but given some of our family history, I figured one teeny comparative analysis couldn’t hurt.
So I did what any other concerned mother would do – went home and dug out my children’s paintings from preschool.
According to the article, the characteristics that would tell me the most about my child’s overall psychological health were the size of the objects in the picture, their attention to detail and the amount of miniature chalk outlines.
My daughters’ drawings were reassuringly normal. She looked like she might grow up to be anything from a homemaker to president to a princess who likes to ride flying horses. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell much from my son’s artwork since he preferred to express his creativity in only one color: black. But I wasn’t worried. There was nothing wron with a picture of solid black. After all, maybe he had a flair for painting night scenes or all of the other colors in the easel had dried up. Or maybe he just liked black. After all, it is slimming.
To be on the safe side, though, I found my son in his room and handed him a piece of paper and a box of crayons.
“Let’s draw Mommy a nice little picture, OK?” I said. “Um, Mom? Are you feeling feverish?”
I promised him that I wasn’t, but I could see we weren’t going to get anywhere. And so I handed my son a few other pages with drawings that he had sketched long ago and asked if he could tell me what they were.
“Well, that’s a pirate,” he began.
“Oh, that’s not so bad,” I interrupted. “And I see he’s hugging his friend.”
“He’s choking him.”
Moving on, my son had drawn a picture of what looked like several colorful balloons floating underneath a cheery, yellow sun.
“Hey, this is nice,” I told him. “What’s it a drawing of?”
“It’s a big scary monster that wants to crush all of the buildings and then stomp on everybody’s car and then pull the people out and tear out their squishy guts and …”
“That’s nice, Honey.” I snatched the picture away. I soon realized that not only my son but also his entire circle of friends, were social deviants.
How could I possibly tell Peter’s mom that the jagged teeth and spiked fingers in his self-portrait, spells aggressive behavior?
So I went back to the doctor’s office, found the magazine, ripped out the article and threw it away.
In the meantime, I’m just going to hope that the Who was correct when they tried to reassure uneasy parents in the 1970s.
As they once said, the kids are alright.
