Coloring books stifle kids’ creativity?

by philg

At a dinner party last night hosted by an artist her daughters shared tales of the severity of their upbringing.  No sugared cereal.  No gun toys.  No coloring books because they stifle creativity; kids should draw freehand.  It was just like our family, I responded!  We were always envious of our cousins who got to eat Fruit Loops and enjoyed coloring books to their hearts’ content.


How did the experiment work out in our family?  My cousin Douglas, raised on a steady diet of coloring books, got his first full-time job at Walt Disney as a character animator.  His credits include Scar in the Lion King, the Hunchback in Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc.  I, by contrast, used the superior drawing skills and creativity acquired in a coloring book-free childhood to become… a computer programmer.


[Where is Doug now you might ask?  He would be working at Disney still if the executives had not looted $2 billion from the company into their personal checking accounts when the economy was booming.  As soon as the economy stopped booming, however, the executives were shocked–shocked!–to discover how depleted the corporate checking account was.  So they said “We can’t afford to do animation in Los Angeles anymore” and shut down the studio founded by Walt Disney himself in 1923.  Doug moved up north to Pixar.]

13 thoughts on “Coloring books stifle kids’ creativity?”

  1. Actually, it doesn’t much matter what your parents do.

    The New Yorker ran a fascinating profile of Judith Rich Harris, a stay-at-home grandmother who single-handedly revolutionized the field of developmental psychology.  Her story should be an inspiration to anyone who wants to have an impact on a scientific field but has no academic affiliation.

    Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

    If adolescents didn’t want to be like adults, it was because they wanted to be like other adolescents.  Children were identifying with and learning from other children, and Harris realized that once you granted that fact all the conventional wisdom about parents and family and child-rearing started to unravel.  Why, for example, do the children of recent immigrants almost never retain the accents of their parents?  How is it that the children of deaf parents manage to learn how to speak as well as children whose parents speak to them from the day they were born?  The answer has always been that language is a skill acquired laterally–that what children pick up from other children is at least as important as what they pick up at home.  Harris was asking whether this was true more generally:  what if children also learn the things that make them who they are–that shape their characters and personalities–from their peer group?  This would mean that, in some key sense, parents don’t much matter–that what’s important is not what children learn inside the home but what they learn outside the home.

    “I was sitting and thinking,” Harris told me, looking bright-eyed as she clutched a tall glass of lemonade.  She is tiny–a fragile, elfin grandmother with a mop of gray hair and a little-girl voice.  We were in her kitchen, looking out on the green of her back yard.  “I told my husband, Charlie, about it.  I had signed a contract to write a developmental-psychology textbook, and I wasn’t quite ready to give it up.  But the more I thought about it the more I realized I couldn’t go on writing developmental-psychology textbooks, because I could no longer say what my publishers wanted me to say.”  Over the next six months, Harris immersed herself in the literature of social psychology and cultural anthropology.  She read studies of group behavior in primates and unearthed studies from the nineteen-fifties of pre-adolescent boys.  She couldn’t conduct any experiments of her own, because she didn’t belong to an academic institution.  She couldn’t even use a proper academic library, because the closest university to her was Rutgers, which was forty-five minutes away, and she didn’t have the strength to leave her house for more than a few hours at a time.  So she went to the local public library and ordered academic texts through interlibrary loan and sent for reprints of scientific articles through the mail, and the more she read the more she became convinced that her theory could tie together many of the recent puzzling findings in behavioral genetics and developmental psychology.  In six weeks, in August and September of 1994, she wrote a draft and sent it off to the academic journal Psychological Review.  It was an act of singular audacity, because Psychological Review is one of the most prestigious journals in psychology, and prestigious academic journals do not, as a rule, publish the musings of stay-at-home grandmothers without Ph.D.s.  But her article was accepted, and in the space below her name, where authors typically put “Princeton University” or “Yale University” or “Oxford University,” Harris proudly put “Middletown, New Jersey.”  Harris listed her CompuServe address in a footnote, and soon she was inundated with E-mail, because what she had to say was so compelling and so surprising and, in a wholly unexpected way, so sensible that everyone in the field wanted to know more.  Who are you? scholars asked.  Where did you come from?  Why have I never heard of you before?

    "Do Parents Matter?  Judith Rich Harris and child development
    ", by Malcolm Gladwell.  The New Yorker, August 17, 1998.

  2. Children soon learn on their own that coloring books are boring. But they can’t “stifle creativity”. That’s on the same order as giving a child a piano but not letting them listen to music for fear they spend their time slavishly copying Rachmaninoff.

  3. When I was in elementary school, my parents bought me all sorts of puzzle books, coloring books, blank paper and markers, and the like. I started to develop an interest and some talent in drawing, and I remember at one point, my parents bought me a few paint by number kits. I loved them, and I brought one in to show off to my art teacher at school. She gave me some harsh words about the creative merit of paint by number kits (she wasn’t the most sensitive lady), and I avoided them after that. I feel like I learned an important lesson from that rejection, but I don’t think that coloring books and paint by numbers and other prescriptive toys stifled my creativity. Hard to tell, though.

    Interestingly, after investing a lot of time in my adolescence in both computers and art, I went the computer programmer route like Philip. Then again, I’m only in my mid-20s, so I have time to flip-flop again.

  4. I was given coloring books, but I didn’t worry too much about the lines. I’m a painter (profitable “hobby”) and a graphic artist (day job) now, so something worked.

  5. I remember an interview with David Lynch (the filmmaker/artist) where he says that his mother didn’t give him coloring books for the same reason. Apparently it worked out well for him.

  6. I would have to expect that coloring books and paint-by-numbers are logical stepping stones that would allow a potential artist to gain basic skills before moving on (‘Hello World’ anybody?). I still get an absurd view of some ‘parent’ scolding a child for not coloring the book correctly, but then I digress..

    FWIW, I attended art school, and now I’m and oracle analyst. Once I got near them pretty humming ‘puters, I’d do just about anything to stay with ’em. 😉

  7. The coloring books were too challenging for me. I did not have enough patience to comlete a single pi…

  8. My son is an artist and graphic designer. He just updated his web site a few days ago, so you can see what he does: http://www.nickworthey.com . I, a scientist, taught him confidence with computers. My ex-wife, with some artistic talent, taught him art. Very early—when he was maybe 3—we made a decision that he could have all the art materials he wanted, and we would in general not criticize his art. He had coloring books, but we did not tell him to draw inside the lines, not to waste materials, or anything like that. The goal was that he should not have any attitude of fear, anger, defensiveness, or neurosis about the art. He accepted this challenge and as he was developing his skills, he was his own critic. He set higher standards than a teacher or parent would. As an adult, he has a tremendous power of concentration while doing art or computer work.

    When Nick was small, I recall a neighbor bragging that she did not allow her children to color outside the lines. That is what we sought to avoid: coercion and talking—left brain activities—in relation to the right-brain activity of drawing. If you look at Nick’s black-white cartoons, you’ll see that he can bring together the drawing and verbal skills in an appropriate way. But he does not waste time talking about drawing.

  10. In evolutionary terms, we are the descendants of generations of children who survived their parents.

  11. I was allowed colouring books and draw any where on the paper I wanted. I even enjoyed trying to paint a little at some point in my very early double-digit years. I was encouraged, but not forced to, do anything I wanted, any way I wanted.

    I am now a computer programmer who can’t paint, draw or probably even do paint by numbers for shit.

  12. I grew up in a Waldorf school, where the mantra is “the only thing a child can do with a complete toy is take it apart”, and wonder now if whatever resourcefulness and imagination I learned by anthropomorphizing rocks and playing with other incomplete toys made up for my lack of integration with the popular culture.

    And quite often art is what happens within constraints. It’s the limitations of watercolors that allows them to convey different messages than photographs.

    I’m still not sure that much positive comes from excessive television exposure or overly sugared cereals, but as I get older I’m much more willing to be of the world rather than merely in it; striving to be a part of the culture rather than trying to understand it intellectually while remaining outside of it.

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