Understanding family relationships through drawings

Children's family drawings can be an excellent basis for revealing the unspoken relationships within the family. Elements such as color or design hint at internal coalitions, dominance and the general quality of family relationships.

Knowing how to analyze family drawings opens a door to new and fascinating insights that are often hidden from the parents', educators' and clinicians' view, such as children's real feelings towards each family member.

Lesson Objective

This lesson will give you the required tools to analyze children's family drawings and better understand family dynamics.

Family drawings can give you the answer to questions such as:

• How do children experience their parents?
• Are parents meaningful to their children?
• Is the parents' educational approach suitable for their child?
• Does the child experience himself as part of a loving, caring family unit?
• Does he feel detached and misunderstood by his family?
• What is the quality of relationships between the siblings?
• How to identify non age-appropriate experiences?
• How does a child cope with a newborn in the family?

Lesson Content

In this lesson you will discover:

The importance of figures selected and their order

The meaning of a child's decision to include or omit certain family members from his drawings and the importance and meaning of the first figure drawn.

Also, we review general aspects of family drawings, such as how to ask a child to draw his family and some reasons for his resistance to do so.

What's behind the drawing of family surroundings and activities

The importance of background variables. The general surrounding and family activities in the drawing are also significant inputs in your analysis because they point to family issues.

You will learn about the importance of the drawing's general appearance, the meaning of kinetic family drawings, and the significance of a family member's activity as part of a drawing. We also share a great method, which kids like, to overcome resistance to making family drawings.  

The quality of relationships in a family as indicated by children's drawings

Tools that will help you assess the quality of family relationships and internal coalitions, as represented in children's drawings. Understanding how children experience their family is significant to the ability to improve family relationships and dynamics.

Often, family relationships and dynamics are intimately related to internal coalitions, so it is important to identify such coalitions, similar to the identification made during family therapy.

What are the unique characteristics of a large family?

A child to a family with more than six people experiences himself and his family in a different manner, which is also reflected in his drawings. You will discover what those characteristics are and what they mean. 

How children cope with harsh realities through their drawings

Children's drawings have the power to reshape children's inner reality or express their wishes. In most cases, when reality is problematic for them, they will change or improve on it to create a better one on the drawing page.

In this lesson you will be presented with case studies illustrating how children choose to change their reality through drawings so as to cope with their difficulties.

What do children really feel about the birth of  a new sibling?

In this part of the lesson you will understand how drawings of older siblings represent their feelings about the newborn. Order of birth in general, and the birth of a newborn in particular are significant issues for children and even for adults. Knowing how to analyze drawings will enable you to assess the impact of these factors.  

Why do certain children refuse to draw a family?

Naturally, behind every resistance there is a reason related to the child's character or to an event in his past. This lesson will familiarize you with the various reasons for children's refusal to make family drawings. You will also acquire recommendations on how to cope with such refusal, which you can later implement in your practice.
 
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