11 House Drawings
Your boy is withdrawn? Your girl will not share her feelings? How important it
is to know, if only just a little, about how your child experiences his immediate
social environment!
Naturally, home is one of the most common elements in children's drawings – you do not have to ask the child to draw a house, but just look for a house drawing in his collection.
What do we look for in house drawings?
1. You may find a house in every drawing. That house could be at the center or in the margins of the page.
2. Houses can be drawn in all tools – crayons, pastels or markers.
3. The various parts of the house stand for the patterns of attachment
and confidence experienced by the child vis-à vis his close family Members.
We are all familiar with the "classic" house drawing: a square with a triangle on top – representing the main structure and the roof. Sometimes, we find a tree or an animal at the entrance to the house, and almost always the sky and/or sun up above. But when the word "house" or "home" becomes more emotionally charged, children's drawings change.
House drawings may indicate emotional upheaval due to the following reasons, among others:
1. The child may be using the drawing to emotionally work through a recent relocation.
2. The child may be working through issues related to family relations.
3. The child may be working through issues related to his relations with his immediate social environment.
The door
In children's house drawings, the door may have many meanings, but it chiefly signifies the entrance, or in emotional terms, the gateway to the child's inner world. In other words, various ways of drawing the door can indicate the child's degree of emotional accessibility or openness to emotional dialogue with others: Is the child willing to be exposed? How much? How emotionally available is he right now? What defense mechanisms is he using to avoid exposure? And even – What is the best way to hold an emotional dialogue with him?
Importantly, like other drawing subjects, house drawings can shed light on the child's emotional situation as it unfolds in time. Often, interventions such as family counseling, parental guidance or individual emotional therapy for the child himself affect his degree of openness to dialogue in varying ways. For example, sometimes the emotional door is shut, not only when mental health professionals intervene, but also right before going into first grade. Conversely, it may open after a process of parental guidance or emotional Therapy.
The drawings shown below have been made by children who had undergone an emotionally difficult relocation. Analyzing such drawings is important as it can tell the parent or practitioner what emotional issue is preoccupying the child at the moment.
Here are two heuristics that will help you analyze the drawings attached:
Excessive attention to the door area
The drawing has many parts. If the child focuses and spends a long time on drawing a certain part, this means he devotes particular emotional attention to it. Studies found that when children linger on the door area they are preoccupied (around the time the drawing is made) with the emotional meanings it signifies, including issues such as exposure, interacting with others, and access to one's intimate world.
Smaller elements in the door area
Elements such as locks or peepholes also deserve particular attention, particularly in terms of their drawing style.
Children often use art to articulate their feelings about the reality that is outside the limits of the page. Moreover, they sometimes use the drawing as an opportunity to create an alternate reality, compensating for their inability to change their actual lived experience.
The drawings presented here are characterized by protections of different kinds. In one case, these are massive animals that appear near the entrance to "protect" the house". In the other, we can see the more common element of fences around the house. Fences are particularly laden with meaning when the children invest considerable energy in drawing them, and linger for a long time over this part of the drawing. We may find thickened, massive fences as well as fences drawn with thick crisscrossed lines.
Children are mindful of events around them, whether adults choose to share with them or not. They are aware of emotional storms and can register emotional complications, even if they find it difficult to express them in words. House drawings are very common and appear very early on – right after the scribbling stage, around age three when human figures begin to appear in drawings. The children acquire the requisite graphic tools and after several months the "house" begins to appear in their drawings.
The conclusion is obvious – whether children agree to relocate or not, they are forced to deal with the uncertainties involved. These inevitably affect their behavior and are articulated in their drawings. Leaving home and moving to a new house – whether or not it is emotionally charged as in the drawings above – is a significant issue for any child, and drawings can be used as an additional and significant source of information about the child's emotional readiness for the expected move, thus orienting his parents to issues they should emphasize when referring to the relocation, to make it easier for the Child.