WHY DO KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN STOP SCRIBBLING?

In many kindergartens in Israel, there is typical disturbing behavior of children. They stop drawing and scribbling, and if they do, they become frustrated and say their drawings are ugly.
In these kindergartens, coloring pages are given by the adults, parents, that sometimes draw an image the child requests to fill it with colors.
The outcome is that the child compares his drawings to his parent or teacher. Thus, the natural flow of scribbling and drawing of childhood is disturbed at a very young age, and they stop drawing.

A kindergarten teacher asked me to help her with this issue.

The question was: can we heal this?

Will children scribble again naturally, even after being exposed to coloring books? To copying?

Can we turn the wheels back?

I came to the kindergarten that morning and prepared a suggestion for four:  line-dot table. It contained: 2 kinds of paper and a few linear tools such as different sizes of markers, black pens, etc.

What is this? Asked the first child.

This is a scribble doodle table. Would you like to try it?

Very quickly, many wanted to scribble and create different lines. I hung the work immediately.

Why do you hang this? It is only a scribble.

I love scribbles, and there are so many of them! Can you discover a few?

It might also be interesting for other children to look at and perhaps have ideas about what they want to do.

The meaning of this intervention:

Using black lines only encourages the brain to investigate shapes, lines, and dots. This brought the children immediately to their natural developmental phase to create from. The natural flow was revived. If there were colored pens it would most likely go into schemas as rainbows, hearts, flowers, etc. 
The weeks followed, almost all children began doodling once again as their frustration around “ugly” drawings disappeared.
In that kindergarten, coloring books were not allowed, and the parents were notified, and many of them made some changes at home.
I think that part of this low self-esteem expression of even very young children is connected to how the western world understands education.
In many kindergartens [in Isreal], almost all suggestions, interventions are aimed at learning cognitively. Reading and math are the top priority of our society.

Play and art are manipulated, for that matter. Suggesting a child of four to copy an image is doing just that. Teaching him how to draw a human figure, correcting him is a total problematic impingement.

The western world measures quantitative elements!

We love numbers and tables, as they seem scientific, meaning it is good, right.

BUT, HOW CAN ONE MEASURE CURIOSITY, PLAYFULNESS, JOY, IMAGINATION, KINDNESS, SHARING?

They are all qualitative! And these qualities are the ones that make us human and not our ability to read at the age of five.

So drawings that are representative receive praise, and play, imagination, and joy for their own sake are rare.

Have we forgotten that we are much more than cognitive creatures?

article thegoodenoughstudio.com