How do you teach your child to draw?

Toddler 1-3 Years

This sounds weird but what I mean by that is making more than straight line strokes all over the paper. My daughter is 3 and when we draw or color together she ends up just asking me to draw different things for her. When I suggest she makes something too, "why don't you try to draw a heart?", she refuses and insists I do it for her. I've tried hand-over-hand guiding to try to show her she can make circles and hearts if she moves her wrist differently but she usually pulls her hand away from me. If I stop drawing at all and ask her to try she will always go "I can't!" (which i hate,) I positively try telling her she can and she just needs to practice and she'll quickly make a few straight line marks on the paper and go "see, I can't!" I'm not really sure if I just let her develop on her own and focus more on defined shapes when its time to learn to trace letters in a couple months or if I'm missing something to help it click for her. She doesn't keep in the lines coloring but she's progressed from random marks all over the paper to coloring in specific regions of the picture, so I know she has the beginning understanding of how to use her crayons/chalk/marker to only color the places she wants.

Posted Aug 4, 2025, 4:33 PM UTC

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