Do You Really Want Your Kid to Be an Artist?

Me at 7, trying to be an artist.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an artist. Or a botanist, or a hair-dresser. My parents and grandparents gave me wonderful art supplies, and my father even made me a palette with a hole in it for my thumb, and positioned the kitchen stool in front of the wall of our trailer for me to use as a painting stool. That’s me in the photo, in the early nineteen-eighties, feeling wonderful and accomplished, but with absolutely no idea of what it meant to “be an artist”.

So What, Exactly, Is an Artist?

I'm an artist, now. Twenty-five years and two kids after I got my degree in visual arts, my career is built on helping people reach beyond societal expectations to un-silence themselves, and connect genuinely with the world we inhabit. I do paint, and I do have gallery exhibitions, but I also tromp in the forests, use materials I never imagined would one day be called “materials”, and make art I never imagined would be called “art.” The focus of my work is to connect people with our own deeply-held stories; as an explorative learning consultant I also encourage parents and teachers to do the same with their children. It turns out art was just a vehicle for something more important to me. And I’m still an artist.

The stereotype of the famous artist making masterpieces in his (he's almost always male, white and powerful) studio has almost nothing to do with a successful art career. I wish somebody had explained this to me when I was a kid. Picasso was an abusive, deceitful creep, and we don't have to appreciate his work to be artists. There’s SO much more wonderfulness in being an artist than I had imagined! So much more diversity!

Artists are responsible for not only the beauty we see in our human-made world, but also for the connection we make with neighbours, for the realizations we make about our own lives and feelings when we watch movies, listen to music, or read books. Artists determine how easy it is to use the devices we buy. Through media, artists determine which devices and foods and colours will be more popular. They understand the influence of shapes, colours, sound, movement and texture on our emotions, and... like it or not, our emotions govern much of what we do. Artists are powerful. A “career in the arts” is a massively open-ended term, but also, having a grounding in artistic practice and theory means a deeper foundation or influence in any career we choose. Moreover, having the ability to express ourselves is an important foundation of meaningful connection.

I like to imagine a world full of people who were encouraged in this way. How happy, satisfied, and valuable could we all be? How would our chosen paths be enhanced by a facility with self-expression and material, sound, or movement exploration? Do you really want your kid to be an artist? And if so, how can you support them?

What NOT to do: Unsolicited "Help"

It's incredibly easy to break kids' confidence in art (or anything) and less easy to build it. As with so much in life, the first thing we can do to "help" our kids succeed is to get out of their way. It's not easy, especially when we're watching them struggle with something we know there's an easy solution for. But we zip our mouths, find something else to occupy our attention, and trust that they'll get where they need to go. And never, ever critique.

Criticism is more likely to break our confidence than to teach us something, and a shattered confidence is a massive barrier to success. My daughter is a writer, and was recently working on her second novel. I edited her first novel for her, judiciously reporting back on only glaring typos and missing punctuation. It was an amazing realistic fiction coming-of-age story, written from the bold heart of a young girl whose grandfather had recently died. I love it so much I heartily recommend it to readers of all ages. Her next novel, though, was a departure from the world she knew and understood so well, and required a steep learning curve. It was an epic fantasy, full of people from different cultures and a massively complex magical world... all of which she dutifully researched and developed before writing. But then she was challenged by trying to fit this enormous complexity into a single story. And when it came time for me to edit her book, I didn't hold back with the criticisms and suggestions. Some chapters were confusing, some events seemed out of place, and mostly I was confused by the timeline. Sure, she was only fourteen, but I just knew she was capable, so I critiqued! Despite my attempts at being gentle with my criticism, it all seemed insurmountable to her, and after a few attempts at editing, she abandoned the book. To her credit, she's keeping an open mind about the possibility of writing it in the future, but unfortunately I feel I threw a hammer at a beautiful glass sculpture she was creating, that actually she just needed more time with, alone. Without my critiquing.

So that's how not to build confidence. Just think of all the ways we're doing that, in every part of our kids' lives, and even our own. So many of us have an overachieving inner critic. And a culturally-supported fear that that critic is what's keeping us on the straight-and-narrow. But you know what? It's not. What would happen if we just didn't correct our kids? Well I have some experience with that, now, both in teaching and parenting. It's ridiculously hard to shut up my inner critic sometimes, but when I do, the kids thrive.

My daughter is truly an excellent writer--so much so, that in her frantic enthusiasm she charges ahead, forgetting to put periods at the ends of sentences, capitals on names, or sometimes misspelling words. She edits herself, and (as we all are prone to doing) sees right through her mistakes to read what she intended to write. What if she asks me to edit and I just ignore those mistakes? I've experimented with that. Sometimes she looks over her work later and discovers her mistakes. Sometimes she puts it aside for a few months, grows and learns, and comes back to it to realize she would now write it differently. Sometimes, even, she submits or publishes something with mistakes. And you know what? That's just fine! I frequently go back to my own work from years earlier, and see how much I've learned and grown since my thirties--and yet my work was appreciated then, as well. Have you any idea how many typos I still find in my writing? Tons. I'm especially accomplished at missing words and totally redundant examples. Sometimes I don't even bother to correct them. Because they're part of my humanity. Our kids deserve that space to be human, too.

Honouring Growth

Rhiannon, age 5, experimenting with paints.

As a visual artist, I love to look back and see all my mistakes. I look at portraits I painted years ago, and wonder why I did them the way I did; sometimes I also notice things I thought were problems at the time, that now inform new directions in my work. Growth is where it's at, people! Otherwise what are we living for? In some deep place, children know this, as from the moment they're born they challenge themselves to grow by exploring different tastes, movements, and expressions.

Children, like my daughter in the photo, above, want to represent their world. But it isn't always as we might expect! As parents, we have a choice about whether to show our children how to draw things the way we think it should be done, or to allow them to discover their own ways, through experimentation. My son was once drawing a whole page full of lines, and I asked him what he was drawing (something I've since learned not to do), and he told me it was a drum. I was totally perplexed, and asked him where the parts of the drum were. This was a boy who had no problem drawing a circle--why would he choose to represent a drum with a whole lot of unconnected lines? "It's the sound of the drum." He said. Boom.

He didn't need my assumptions. He needed my appreciation, and the freedom to keep exploring. As long as we respond to our kids' experiments with curiosity and loving encouragement, they'll continue to know that where they are on their journey of growth is perfect. And that will be the impetus they need to keep growing with enthusiasm. I have no idea how my son's drawings of sound influenced his life, but considering he now is employed as a visual artist and makes music to accompany his personal visual projects, I'm relieved I didn't get in the way of that particular growth pattern by showing him "how to draw a drum."

Asking Helpful Questions

I realized during my children's earliest years that questions like "what are you drawing?" are extremely limiting. In that question I have determined that my child must be trying to represent a specific thing, and the assumption is usually that it's a visual representation of something we know. But what if it's not? What if it's our children's experimentation with colours, shapes or lines? Or sound, as in the drum example? That kind of experimentation--without intent to satisfy outside demands--is essential for learning to use materials. Professional artists actually bill for material experimentation; it's called "research". We even sometimes mount gallery exhibitions composed entirely of experimental output--often to great acclaim. So why would I limit the possibilities of my own child's artistic output?

But we want to ask questions! We know it's important to engage and encourage! So how can we ask questions that promote growth-dialogue about art (or anything), without limiting our children's growth or expression?

Think about the words in the question "What are you drawing?" The word 'what' carries the assumption they're trying to represent an object. The word 'drawing' means we assume they're focused on the output of the material in their hands, as opposed to the feeling, taste, smell, or movement of it. How are these assumptions limiting the range of acceptable answers?

Drawing by Taliesin, age 3.

Maybe we have a kid who is happy to contradict us, and says, "I'm not drawing anything. I'm dancing the pen," or, as in my son’s drawing, above, “Nothing. I didn’t tell you.” (I learned a lot about parenting from that bold rejection.) But more likely, our kid wants to please us; to learn from our example, and will find a suitable answer, like, "some lines," or as my daughter used to do, look at a bunch of lines she was experimenting with and come up with a wild explanation like, "it's a dog on a house with the family having dinner." It's tragically very common that kids learn to minimize themselves to match what they perceive coming from adults. I've seen plenty of kids who were making successful attempts at depicting what might have been people or animals declare that they were “just scribbling.” Why? Because maybe they feared hearing our criticisms, or maybe we've previously defined their drawings of animals as 'scribbling', or maybe, because their own inner critic is already developed enough to silence their voice.

Adults are notoriously bad at asking kids questions, and kids generally have rote answers ready to respond to each of them: How old are you? How is school? What are you making? What is your favourite colour/subject/sport/etc.? How are we so uninspired?! These questions aren't about engaging with kids or developing rapport; they're expected. What if, instead of asking what they're drawing, we invite them to tell about what they're doing? This is an open invitation to consider what they're doing and talk about it. It's up to us to be open to hearing their response, no matter how long, unexpected, or confusing it may be. Not all questions will be helpful for all kids in all situations, but through practice we can become better at asking good questions. Here's a list of interesting open-ended questions to use in engaging kids to talk about their art:

• Interesting! Can you tell me about this?
• Does this have a story or feeling?
• How do you feel about what you're doing?
• Show me how you like to use [material]...
• What do you think about the materials you're using?
• Are there any other materials you'd like to use?

Materials

Ah how I love shopping for materials!! And hoarding them!! Don't we all?! How much of our parenting waste is comprised of once-used adorable kits that were soon replaced by something newer and more exciting? I won't go on at length about this, because I've previously written a whole article about Materials for Open-Ended Art Exploration. But suffice it to say that well-chosen art materials are the foundation of good artistic experience. And I don't mean the expensive stuff. I mean well-chosen. Materials can be anything from kitchen supplies to mud and sticks outside, to a mish-mash of mark-making, gluing, cutting and melting tools. The important feature of all of these things is that they do not come with instructions or intended uses. How we present and use materials is much more important than what they are.

Modelling

From the moment they were born, and possibly earlier, our kids have looked to us to lead them. The important thing to remember about modelling to our children is that it's happening all the time; not just when we do it intentionally. Our kids see our hesitation and fear with art as much as they see our enthusiasm. They see us avoid trying new things, and they see us when we courageously do them, and when we have small successes and failures. They emulate not only our actions but also the way we emotionally deal with these things.

With this in mind, the absolute best thing we can do for our children is to use any and all materials available to us to explore creatively, for our own happiness. That last bit is important. Kids can smell a fraud from a mile away, so we have to be creative in the way that we want to be. Otherwise we're just teaching our kids to put on a show for someone else's benefit, and that's nothing about authenticity.

And we should stretch ourselves. If we're accustomed to buying craft kits and following the instructions, we should absolutely try to break that habit (more on why in the materials article, above) and try experimenting with new materials. We can also stretch our definition of art-making. Try experimental baking! Try sewing or crocheting! Try putting on your favourite music, getting dressed up in fancy dress or costumes and dancing your heart out! Try painting your whole self and rolling around on an old sheet, outside. In the rain! It doesn't matter what or how you engage in art, just as long as you do it. And if your output isn't what you expect? Even better. Keep experimenting. You're modelling growth to your children.

Living a life full of joyful exploration and learning, ourselves, is the best way we can teach our children.
 

Nurturing Important Skills

Me at 4, being an artist.

We’re culturally trained to associate specific skills and attributes with art: dancers should be thin and flexible, visual artists should be able to draw realistic depictions with technical skills like shading, perspective, and colour theory; musicians should first learn to read music and do scales. Unless we’re born talented, of course.

Oh hell, I hate the word ‘talent’! It's such a harmful concept. I wasn't born talented; I developed some skills in accurate rendering of my observations by having a keen interest in observing how things are put together; how the light plays on them, and being given room to experiment with materials throughout my life. It was easy for me because I loved it, just like my daughter loves telling stories, so writing is easy for her to learn. We develop the skills we need when we realize we need them, and as long as we're not discouraged from exploring them.

As parents and teachers, we need to help build foundational skills for life, and trust that those material skills will come when needed. As an artist, I owe a huge amount of my career satisfaction to some less-concrete skills and passions:

• seeing the big picture in life, art, etc.
• a keen interest in social phenomena
• a passion for exploration and discovery

We really can't know what skills will be foundational for each of the unique kids we work with. Neither can we know the cultural landscape our kids will grow into, nor what careers will be common, when they’re grown. Who knew, when I was in art school twenty-five years ago that people would be making virtual and even invisible art to sell online, one day? Who knew I’d raise a son who gets paid to make thousands of geographically plausible planet renderings by using procedural generation techniques? His art process looks like a bunch of visual programming. I could never have predicted this, never mind taught him these skills. So when trying to support kids I parent and teach, I try to encourage growth of all sorts of skills. Life is not divided by subject. Careers are not determined by skill-acquisition. It's all interconnected. The more we learn, the more we can learn.

So Do You? Really?

Yes. I guess I really do want my kids to be artists--however that looks for them, and however it looks in the future we can only dream of. I want them to explore all the materials and develop all the skills I can’t even fathom right now. I want them to change the definition of the word “artist” to mean new and wonderful things, and I want them to keep on growing as the world grows, around them.

Parenting and Gardening with Climate Change: The Aesthetic of Allowing Diversity

This morning we put the tomato and pepper seedlings out on the porch again. They've been waiting for the ground to warm up enough to be transplanted, for weeks. It was nearly freezing last night, just above ground, in early May. And now weather forecasters are predicting that La Niña might stick around all summer. Bad news for the Atlantic hurricane season, great news for our Pacific fire season, and... sad prospects for my warmer-weather food crops. Climate change is one thing for sure: unpredictable. And along with the weather, our food, finances, and children's futures are all unpredictable, too.

Diversity in the Garden
Our strategy for dealing with this unpredictability has been to become more independent. I guess psychologically it's about keeping control of our own actions, when so much else is now reeling out of control. But practically speaking, it's also very helpful: The more we learn about the way we and our needs work, the more capable we are of supporting ourselves, of creatively solving problems that arise, and of adapting to our rapidly-changing world. So we're growing many of our own foods now, unschooling our kids, and diversifying our own skillsets. Put simply, we're diversifying how we live, just like financial investors diversify assets. Thrivent says "the idea is to avoid putting all of your eggs in one basket—because something bad could happen to that basket."  We don't have any financial investments, but the same strategy applies to living, eating, educating ourselves, and planning our future, in general. So we grow warm weather crops, cool weather crops, fruit trees of various types, summer crops and winter crops, and root, leaf, flower and fruit crops. It looks like this year we'll have a lot of potatoes, celery, spinach, kale, broccoli and cauliflower... and apples, if the bees do well, which is still in question.

There are a lot of questions, these days. Among them, how to save seeds. I received a newsletter from our local seed supplier recently, in which he explained the importance of diversity in seed-saving: 

        "We’ve all experienced accelerated climate change and it’s important to prepare for more of the same if we are to have successful harvests. The best strategy can be summed up in one word: Diversify!
        "We can be hit by extreme cold, heat, wind or rain at anytime during the growing season. If we can, we should not trust all our seeds to one sowing. We should stagger and expand our plantings as well as planting our crops in both shade and sun. We can also think about working with friends and neighbours to mutually maximize our locations."
                            ~ Dan Jason, Saltspring Seeds

See that? This is a seed supplier encouraging his customers to grow and save our own seeds, to share with neighbours, and basically to evolve away from supporting his seed-growing business. Why? Because obviously, he and his business will do better if we all do. He's diversifying his own network of seed-growers and customers, as well as his output. He also wrote a small book about seed saving, and frequently writes blogs, articles, newsletters and other things about how to grow plants and seeds in these changeable times. A greedier businessperson might not encourage seed-saving, when they can make more money upfront if their customers remain ignorant about this practice. Dan Jason is looking at our mutual future, and diversifying all of our prospects, in community. There will always be a place for that.

Diversity in Life and Education
Which brings me to the human side of this picture: How do we diversify our own human community; our own skill-sets, to ensure our adaptability as the world changes around us? I threw out the word unschooling back there, like it was nothing, and for our family it really is nothing these days, but I know it's rather out-of-left-field for some people. Here's what I'm going on about: Unschooling is the practice of allowing our kids (and ourselves) to explore any and all of their interests, on their own time, in their own ways, and just seeing what comes out of it all! Without going too far into our own experiences (read more about our unschooled young adult children at our blog, if you like), our family is now reassured that unschooling was an excellent choice for our kids' future. After many years of determining and following their own interests, they have become agile thinkers, able to check in with their own needs, fulfill those needs successfully, and change course when the need arises. What more can one ask for, in a future where no career choice is guaranteed, nor even the ground we stand upon?

But that's our kids--what about us? We're a couple of middle-aged adults, one dependent on a satisfactory job that doesn't meet our evolving ethical standards, and the other now disabled by long-covid. Can we still unschool? The answer is yes, and we've been doing it with our kids these past many years. Our skill-sets have grown as our needs changed, and we find ourselves becoming reasonably adept at growing food, raising and processing chickens, building needed devices, implements and home-improvements, and also learning to live together, twenty-four-seven, peacefully. We're also becoming very good at living more simply, and finding joy in a life far less cluttered by activities and must-haves than it once was. Life is always about unending personal growth--it's just that climate change and related social change have caused us to appreciate that more.

The Aesthetic of Natural Diversity
What I sometimes struggle to appreciate is the absolute chaos of natural diversity. I mean when you just let things grow however they're going to. It's a mess. Truly. My garden, my kids' educational careers, my own career and even my living room is just truly an absolute mess. But I've learned to see its beauty.

See this lovely mess of a garden bed? We had an open garden here a week ago, and I heard a few people comment on the number of "weeds" we have. And they're not wrong! But the tone of their comments was. Now that I am coming to understand the importance of diversity in my regenerative garden, this picture is pure joy, to me! 

one of the diverse salad-green beds in our garden

What you're looking at here is a few indoor-started heads of lettuce, now ravaged by our salad-needs, along with some dark green kale on the right, flowering out as it does every spring and fall. On the left there's a tiny pink flower--that's a Robert Geranium, considered a weed by most people, but it's antiviral and edible, so I put it in salads and smoothies. Along with this there is a whole plethora of edible asters: dandelions, wild lettuces (and some seeded from our previous years' crops), lambs' quarters, and others. There are teeny tiny bittercress plants everywhere, their leaves and tiny white flowers delicious in salads and sandwiches. There's some chickweed coming up, which will brighten my summer smoothies and delight our chickens, and in the woodchip-covered pathway at my feet, there's a lively mat of winecap mycelium, that pushes up big tasty mushrooms at totally unpredictable times. This garden feeds us. And when I see the diversity of flavours and promise, it's absolutely gorgeous to me.

Parenting can be like that, too. When my kids were young, I used to feel irritated by the drifts of toys, costumes, and craft materials that seemed to cover everything. But I also saw how it mirrored the creative mess of my own art studio, and how my kids dug in their mess, explored and improvised, and eventually also desired to tidy it themselves. Now they're older, their social lives are also somewhat of a primordial stew. I look at my own young-adult memories and how different my social life is now than what I thought I was building, at twenty. I have a few of the same friends, but our interests and priorities have changed many times. My children, of course, are no different, even though right now it's hard for them to imagine how life will change them. Their activities are an eclectic chaos of experimental successes and left-behinds. At twenty, our son is paid as a 3D modeller, but also practices music, concept design, drawing, and is a life-long physics and engineering enthusiast. Our seventeen-year-old daughter runs programs for kids, organizes an alternative education festival, publishes a magazine by and for kids, and has recently also begun a side-career as a dog-trainer. Three or four years ago I could not have predicted many of these directions, but our kids found them and followed them with enthusiasm, and that has set them up for success in our unpredictable world. They're accustomed to wrangling interests and commitments in multiple different directions. They're accustomed to changing course when needs demand it. Our kids' comfort and ease with this chaotic, changeable lifestyle is the gift that unschooling gave them. As our social climate becomes more chaotic, they will fit right in.

The Struggle of Allowing
Then there's the concept of allowing. I'm not really as comfortable with all this as I make it sound. Excited by the prospects; reassured by preliminary observations--yes! But I fight change like the devil, and I am not good at just going with the flow. I'm a child of the eighties. I thought I would pick a career and stick to it forever; have kids who went to school, grew up through birthday parties and grocery shopping and family holidays, and I'd always live a typical low-to-middle-class family life. I also thought Caesar salad would always be easy to buy. Now lettuce is too expensive, eggs for the dressing are even more expensive, chickens are dying by the hundreds of thousands in their barns from flooding and bird flu, and I'm allergic to croutons. Damn. I had to allow my palate to change with the times. 

Sometimes allowing my kids to make choices I don't understand or necessarily agree with feels like gluing my back to the wall; peeling my eyes from the view and willing my voice to fall back into my throat. I pound down my own fears to let my kids thrive or fall flat on their faces. It's like letting the weeds and lettuce seedlings stay under the dominating squash leaves, knowing they'll just die there, but that their failed lives will feed the squash. And then discovering that one of them grew and fed my family, anyway. Allowing is when I know for sure I could make things better in the short term if I just take control, but I also know that I can't see all the variables, so any control I think I have is just a sham, anyway. As our world becomes ever less predictable, I can't predict how my controlling actions will play out in my garden, my life, my kids' education, or even this article. So I force myself to quit trying.

Luckily I've diversified my needs and the seeds I plant, and am learning to cooperate with the changing climate.