When most school’s budgets begin to get tight, art will automatically become the thing that can be easily gotten rid of.  It’s treated like an extra, nice to have but not really necessary thing. But that’s kind of backwards, because for young kids especially, art is doing a lot of important developmental work that nothing else in the school day can really replace.

Think about it…

That scribbling a toddler is making on the page is actually an early form of trying to express something and will eventually lead to written expression. Scribbling is actually one of the earliest forms of a kid trying to communicate something on purpose, it’s basically a step before writing. Researchers have tracked how kids’ drawings develop over time, going from random scribbles to more controlled marks, then basic shapes, then stuff that actually looks like something. It’s kind of a rough parallel to how language develops. For a 2-year-old to draw a circle, and maybe put two dots in it and a curved line underneath as a smile and say “It’s Mommy!”, the 2 year old’s scribbles are functionally similar to what that 4 year old is trying to do as they begin to trace letter forms, using an abstract symbol as a stand-in for something in the real world.

The obvious benefit is fine motor skills, holding a crayon and controlling how hard you press helps build the hand strength kids need for handwriting later. But honestly the symbolic thinking part might matter even more, since it’s an early form of abstract thinking, which is the same kind of thinking you need later for math and reading and science.

Art also trains a totally different kind of problem solving than most of the school does. A math worksheet has one right answer. But if you ask a kid to draw what a windy day feels like, there isn’t one right answer. People sometimes brush this off as “just creativity”, but it’s actually a specific skill, coming up with multiple possible answers and weighing them, instead of just finding the one correct one. Both kinds of thinking matter. A kid who’s only ever practiced finding the single right answer can struggle later when they run into a real problem that is messy and doesn’t have one clean solution, which is most problems in real life honestly. Art class is one of the few places in a normal school day where that kind of thinking actually gets practiced.

There’s also research on something called arts integration, basically using art to teach other subjects instead of teaching art on its own. Kids who illustrate the water cycle, or build a diorama of some historical event, or write a song to remember vocabulary words, tend to remember the material better than kids who just read about it. Making something forces you to actually reorganize the information in your head instead of just passively taking it in, which is a way deeper kind of learning than reading a paragraph and answering some questions after. This also seems to help English language learners and kids with certain learning differences, since they can show what they understand through art without relying entirely on language skills they’re still working on.

Elementary teachers will often say art time is when the classroom actually calms down, and there’s a real reason for that. Young kids don’t have a great ability to regulate big emotions with words yet, so art gives them a low pressure outlet where they don’t have to explain what is wrong. Some schools even use drawing or clay as a way to help an overwhelmed kid settle down before any conversation even happens.

None of this shows up neatly on a standardized test, which is probably why it’s so easy to cut when budgets get tight. But the actual developmental stuff happening underneath, the symbolic thinking, the open ended problem solving, the better retention, the emotional regulation, is real, and it’s not something that’s easy to just replace once it’s gone.

A Pham