How to Encourage Your Child to Draw More

How to get kids to draw more? The intuition that the way to encourage a kid to draw is to praise their drawings turns out to be partly right and significantly wrong. This guide walks through what the research actually says, what it means in practice, and the small things parents can do that make the biggest difference.

The intuition that the way to encourage a kid to draw is to praise their drawings turns out to be partly right and significantly wrong. A large body of research on children's intrinsic motivation — going back to Mark Lepper's "overjustification effect" in the 1970s — suggests that excessive praise of the *output* tends to undermine the kid's relationship with the *process*. Kids who are praised heavily for being "such a good artist" often become more self-critical, less willing to experiment, and more likely to abandon drawing as soon as they sense their work isn't praise-worthy. The interventions that actually correlate with kids drawing more, more often, into older ages, are surprisingly modest: keeping art supplies visible and accessible (rather than locked in a craft cupboard), drawing alongside them (parents who draw at all are statistically more likely to have drawing kids), narrating the process rather than judging the result, asking about the drawings rather than rating them, and most importantly — making drawing a low-stakes, frequent, social activity rather than a special-occasion solo one.

Move the crayons to the kitchen table. Sit down and draw with them. Ask about the drawings instead of rating them. The structural changes outperform the praise changes by an order of magnitude.

The kid who is drawing on the kitchen table while a parent is drawing next to them, while talking about something else entirely, is in the optimal motivational environment. The kid who is drawing alone in their room hoping the parents like the result is in the worst one. Parents who want to materially affect how much their kid draws should focus on those structural conditions far more than on praise calibration.

1. Keep supplies visible and accessible — not locked in a craft cupboard

Friction is the enemy. The crayons should be on a shelf the kid can reach without asking.

2. Draw alongside them — parental drawing is the strongest predictor

Kids whose parents draw are kids who keep drawing. You don't have to be good. You have to be present.

3. Narrate the process, don't judge the result

"You used so much green there" beats "wow, that's amazing". The first describes; the second evaluates.

4. Ask about the drawing — "tell me about this"

Letting the kid narrate their own drawing builds language, ownership, and engagement. The kid is the expert on their own work.

5. Avoid heavy praise of the output

Counterintuitive but well-documented: heavy praise of the result undermines intrinsic motivation. The kid starts drawing for praise instead of for itself.

6. Make it social and low-stakes — not solo and special

A kid drawing at the kitchen table during dinner prep is the optimal scenario. A kid drawing alone in their room hoping for a review is the worst.

Lepper, M.R. & Greene, D. (1978). "The Hidden Costs of Reward." Erlbaum. The original overjustification effect work. Kohn's "Punished by Rewards" (1993) extends this to praise specifically.

Most of this work happens at the kitchen table, not in a planned activity. The single highest-leverage shift most parents can make is to draw alongside their kid, without an agenda, regularly. The drawings that come out of that — even the ones that look like nothing — are doing real cognitive and relational work. Saving a few of them, framing the most meaningful ones, and treating them as artefacts of a year worth remembering closes the loop.