The Scribbling Period: why ‘WHAT IS IT?’ might be the wrong question

Your two-year-old has just spent ten absorbed minutes with a crayon. You lean in, smile, and ask the question every loving parent asks:

“What are you drawing?”

Your toddler looks at you. Then at the paper. Then back at you. Possibly they say “dog” to be polite. Possibly they wander off or stare blankly at you!

It's the most natural question in the world, and in all my years in parent–toddler environments, gently steering parents away from it was one of the hardest parts of my job. Not because it's a bad question, but because for a child under three, it's usually the wrong one. It assumes there's a thing on the paper. Most of the time, the thing was the doing: exploring what happens when yellow meets blue, or practising putting the brush in and out of the paint pot, again and again.

So what is happening?

Between about 18 months and three, children are in what researchers call the scribbling period. It looks random. It isn't.

The artist and researcher John Matthews spent decades watching young children draw and found that early scribbles have real structure. Toddlers stab down to make dots, sweep their arm in big arcs, push and pull the crayon toward and away from their body. Each mark is a trace of a movement, a little record of I did that, and this happened.

Sometimes there's a sound effect. A child roaring while zigzagging across the page isn't drawing a lion. They're being the lion, and the marks are where it went. Look only at the finished paper and you miss the whole story.

Then, often close to three, many children discover the edge of the paper. Suddenly the mission is to fill the whole sheet, corner to corner, layering marks over marks until no white is left. To an adult it can look like a mess. To the child it's a huge discovery about boundaries, inside and outside, the same idea they're exploring when they fill buckets or wrap their teddy in a blanket.

Try this instead

The shift is simple to say and surprisingly hard to do: describe what you see, rather than judge it or ask what it is. Think sports commentator, not art critic.

Instead of…	Try…
“What is it?”	“You made lots of dots, right here.”
“What a beautiful picture!”	“You used red, and then blue went over the top.”
“Is that a car?”	“Your crayon went zoom, zoom, all the way across.”
“It's a bit messy.”	“You covered the whole paper, right to the edges!”
“Good job!”	“You worked on that for a long time.”

Or simply say nothing, and watch. Notice the arm movement, the sounds, the moment they pause and look at what they've done. That quiet attention tells a child their work matters far more than any compliment.

A few other small things that help:

•      Resist the fresh sheet. If they're still working, let them keep going, even when the page looks 'finished' to you.

•      Skip the fridge sometimes. Not every scribble needs to be kept or displayed. For a toddler, the doing is the point.

•      Wait for them to name it. Around three, many children start telling you what their marks are. Let it come from them.

The real masterpiece

Next time your toddler hands you a page of tangled lines, try seeing it the way they do: not as a picture, but as a memory of ten minutes spent discovering what a hand, a crayon and a piece of paper can do together.

The drawing will come. For now, the scribbling is the work, and you get a front-row seat.

Want to go deeper? John Matthews' book Drawing and Painting: Children and Visual Representation and the free booklet Making Marks from the Tasmanian Department of Education are lovely places to start.