Little Picassos: Art at a Young Age

A Parent's Role

Your job as a parent is to encourage and support your child's exploration in art without interfering. Allow your child to define her world and foster her imagination.

Expose your child to fine art, where line is used to reveal varying thoughts and shapes. Works by Franz Kline and Picasso are good examples.

Provide large surfaces and good, safe supplies, because the very young will use the entire space with roundabout motions. Preschoolers love finger paints, watercolors, and markers, for example. (Make sure your child is using nontoxic, water-based supplies.)

Remember, your child's artistic development is a step-by-step process, and she will scribble and repeatedly draw lines until she is ready to convert them into her very own world of symbols.