How to parent an artistic child (especially when you aren’t an artist)
Many parents (including my own) are at a general loss for words when encountering their creative child’s artwork. Parents that have a lack of artistic experience often feel unsure how to approach or support highly creative children, which winds up making their creative child feel isolated, alone, or misunderstood.
While many parents feel comfortable qualifying their child’s scholastic, athletic, or even social aptitude, most are at a loss when it comes to evaluating and supporting an artistic student. This tends to put an exceptional burden on a student’s teacher or on the student themselves to legitimize their own interest and artwork. On top of this, parents who are unfamiliar with art tend to ascribe value to artworks that look realistic, or songs that sound recognizable, or dances that appear challenging - which winds up guiding children not toward self-expression, but in a direction that seeks to please the parent, rather than toward the child artistic growth and interests.
We cannot forget that, as parents, it is our job to support our children in pursuits that we may not understand. In the arts, this may look different than in other pursuits - because the arts generally activate a different kind of learning and thinking than other subject areas.
In order to help an artistic child feel supported and seen, it is important for parents to focus on ideas and inspiration, not on outcomes. We are generally not trained to operate as such, especially when encountering the arts because much of what we see in cultural and social space is completed or historical. We witness acting in a completed movie, art hanging in a museum, dance in a choreographed recital. We receive our child’s grades as a marker of their previous work and tend to evaluate their future possibility based on their past performance. In many ways, this completeness can limit how we engage with students because it orients all of us, artists and teachers, towards a finished outcome. By focusing on process, linkages and ideas, we can reroute the learning a student experiences through art (and through school) towards something more fulfilling and wholly more complex.
Now, this is not to say that a young artist is always interested or willing to share their artwork with their parents. Art-making can be a very private and personal venture. However, it is my experience that a child tends not to share their artwork because they fear a parent’s judgment more than because they are embarrassed about the work. In fact, teenagers and older children frequently do not share their artwork with adults precisely because they care about their work deeply: it is steeped in identity and emotion, and they fear the work will be met with confusion and a lack of enthusiasm.
As in life, young people pursuing art thrive when they have advocates and champions at their side. To some, it can be a friend, a teacher, a professor, but having a supporting parent is key to unlocking the confidence that is necessary to pursue a very abstract goal in the arts.
So what, then, does it look like to be a supportive parent of an aspiring artist?
The answer to this question in art can be very complicated. Perhaps the key component to ensure a student’s continued success in art (or any learning for that matter) is maintaining motivation. We want our children to be persistent and able to navigate difficulty on their own accord - and pursue challenges beyond an initial failure.
In educational spheres, this is known as intrinsic motivation - motivation that comes from one's self, and it is perhaps the most important disposition for any artist or learner to possess. In very generalized terms, intrinsic motivation in the arts stems from a desire to make work based on the natural, internal reward one achieves as opposed to notoriety from an extrinsic party.
Think about how different it feels to go for a run because you want to versus the feeling when you are competing against other runners in a massive race. Or driving in a vehicle to go to the beach versus driving to get to work on time. The frame of mind or the approach that one uses to perform the activity changes vastly when the expectations change.
Above all, it is most important for parents to avoid judgment. This can be difficult because our tendency is to throw a hollow “That’s great!” into our initial interaction with a child’s work. It’s ok to say why you think something is great - but describe it further. This opening up about why - this modeling of thoughtfulness - will not only challenge a child’s thinking, but it will make them feel like you see them. Notice what you see and talk about how you see it.
Along with this is an important note - do not tell a child what they should do in their own art space. Saying something like, “Have you ever thought about what would happen if you tried to include more colors?” is much different than saying “You should add more color to this. It would look so cool!”; or “Did you intend for there to be gray marks on the edges?” instead of “You should erase those marks - it just looks sloppy.”
Ask questions, reward risk-taking rather than technical proficiency. Tell them what parts you like and why. Inquire about what parts were the hardest, what things mean, and what it would look like to push things further. Notice when they try something new and reward the trying as opposed to the outcome.
It is important to understand that making artwork at any level is work. It requires tremendous time, patience, problem-solving, reflection, evaluation, and technical proficiency - and all of this work, more than anything, should be recognized and rewarded. Mark improvement - talk about what things used to look like and what they now look like and tell them you can see the work that they have put in (even if it’s just “thinking work”).
Remember that successful art-making is not about the end product. It is about the process of experimenting and asking questions. Framing work and hanging it in your house is great and important, but we want to maintain the creative challenge, not force masterpieces. While it is incredibly reasonable to value a finished artwork - since most art that we experience exists in a state of “completion” (paintings on the wall, movies on a screen, etc.) - it also ignores the moment that the art is happening, which is when it is being created. What we see in a museum, for instance, is an artifact of the artistic process, and using an artifact to evaluate a process is very different than determining whether an artwork is successful or not. Learning is an accumulation of failures - and we need our students to fail - to learn from what works and what doesn’t - to try new things at the risk of destroying old things. It is scary. It is hard. It is necessary. However, as a parent, it is not our role to call something a failure, but to notice risks, reward them, and support additional risks.
Unfortunately, it is par for the course that much of a student’s art education will exist in a limited time frame in a school that does not value high-quality art creation - meaning, art projects undertaken within schools are often meant to fit specific classroom standards rather than personal expression. Similarly, the arts being taught are often representative of a more “classical” form of art-making, which may or may not relate to a student’s creative interest. Many art teachers in high school are excellent, but there are also some that are simply directing our children in the wrong way - without a sufficiently individualized teaching pedagogy or theoretical basis in contemporary art-making. If this is the case, it is important to find alternative spaces for high-quality arts education. One thing I often recommend to parents of high schoolers is to seek advanced studies at a local community college if a student shows sincere interest in the arts. These classes tend to be taught by professional artists and offer the students a glimpse as to what studying art at a college can be. In addition, classes taken at community colleges can often count as college-credit classes after a student matriculates into college. If a community college is not close by or a challenge for your family, reach out to Vision Field for referrals, tutoring, mentorship, and support.
In summary, our recommendations for parents of art students are to:
1. Talk to your child about their artwork. Ask them what are they working on, what things mean, why they did certain things, and what they want to do with it.
2. Allow them to try new things and reward them for doing it. Notice when they do something new. If they are scared to “fail” offer to document their piece (take a high-quality picture) as it is so that it is not “lost” forever.
3. Don’t ignore things that seem difficult. Students have to feel safe expressing themselves, and part of that needs to come from their families. Feel it out, but don’t be scared to have a hard conversation.
4. Don’t treat art as something playful. It is work. It is hard work. Make sure to notice this and reward it.
5. If you feel that your child is not getting the kind of guidance that they need from your local art teacher, seek additional resources and reach out to Vision Field for help. Community colleges, local arts non-profits, or even artists can help students understand their work better and to improve on their process.
