Practical and psychological support for parents and children

Week 5: Beyond Words

Using Art and Creativity to Support Emotional Expression and Regulation

Sometimes children cannot tell us what they are feeling. Creativity can give those feelings somewhere else to go.

Last week, we explored the role music can play in supporting emotional regulation, particularly for children for whom spoken language is not always the easiest or most accessible way to communicate. This week, I want to continue that conversation by looking at another form of expression that has been part of children’s lives for generations: art and creativity.

When we think about helping children understand their emotions, we often think first about language. We encourage children to name their feelings, talk about what has happened and tell us what they need. There is value in developing emotional vocabulary, but we also need to recognise just how complex this process can be.

Before a child can tell us “I feel anxious”, they need to recognise changes occurring within their body, understand that these sensations relate to an emotional experience, differentiate anxiety from other feelings, find the language to describe it and then communicate that experience to another person.

That is a considerable cognitive and emotional task.

For some autistic children, children with ADHD, learning disabilities, developmental differences or communication difficulties, the gap between feeling something and being able to explain it may be particularly significant. Research into alexithymia, for example, has identified difficulties with recognising and describing emotional experiences in a substantial proportion of autistic people, although importantly this is not experienced by all autistic individuals and should not be viewed as an inevitable characteristic of autism (Kinnaird, Stewart and Tchanturia, 2019).

For children who are non-speaking, use AAC or have significant learning or communication needs, our reliance on spoken emotional language can create an additional barrier. A child can experience fear, frustration, excitement, sadness or overwhelm without having an accessible verbal means of communicating those experiences.

This does not mean the emotional experience is absent.

It means we may need to become more imaginative about how we help children express it.

And this is where creativity becomes particularly interesting.

Giving an Internal Experience an External Form

There is something fundamentally different about asking a child to tell us how they feel and giving them an opportunity to express themselves.

Art allows an internal experience to become something external and tangible without necessarily requiring the child to understand or explain that experience first. A feeling can become colour, movement, texture, shape or simply the physical process of creating.

For some children, this may provide a less demanding route into emotional expression.

A child may not be able to explain the frustration they have carried home from school, but they may become absorbed in pressing, squeezing and reshaping clay. Another child may draw with large energetic movements after an overwhelming day. Another may quietly arrange colours, objects or materials into a pattern that feels predictable and manageable.

The importance here is not that we interpret these activities as direct representations of particular emotions. We cannot assume that vigorous drawing represents anger or that choosing a dark colour represents sadness.

Rather, creative activity can provide a space in which the child does not have to translate everything they are experiencing into words.

This distinction is supported by research into arts-based therapeutic approaches. Systematic reviews of art therapy with children suggest potential benefits across a range of psychological, behavioural and emotional outcomes, while also highlighting variation in the quality and strength of the existing evidence (Cohen-Yatziv and Regev, 2019). Similarly, research examining arts therapies within primary school settings has suggested that creative therapeutic approaches may contribute to children’s emotional and psychological wellbeing, although the authors emphasise the need for stronger and more consistent research methodologies (Moula et al., 2020).

We therefore need to avoid presenting creativity as a magical solution for emotional dysregulation. The evidence does not justify that claim.

What it does encourage us to consider is something more nuanced: creative processes can offer children forms of engagement and expression that are different from talking alone.

For children whose communication, cognition or emotional processing makes conventional verbal approaches difficult, that difference may matter enormously.

Creativity Is About the Process, Not the Picture

As adults, we are very accustomed to focusing on outcomes.

When a child paints, we look at the painting.

When they draw, we ask what they have drawn.

When they build something, we admire what they have made.

Yet when we think about creativity in relation to emotional regulation, the finished product may be far less important than the process involved in making it.

Creating is physical.

Drawing involves repetitive movement and visual attention. Clay can be pushed, rolled, flattened and reshaped. Paper can be folded, torn and arranged. Paint moves across a surface. Collage involves choosing, sorting and organising. Building materials can be constructed, dismantled and reconstructed.

These experiences involve the body as well as the mind.

And that is significant because emotional regulation is not simply a cognitive process. Emotional arousal is experienced physiologically. When children become overwhelmed, frustrated or anxious, their bodies are involved in that experience. Providing opportunities for safe movement, sensory engagement, concentration and repetition may therefore offer some children a way of organising their experience without requiring them to sit still and talk about it.

For a child with ADHD, for example, emotional dysregulation may interact with difficulties involving inhibition, attention and behavioural control. Research suggests that emotion dysregulation can contribute substantially to the functional difficulties experienced by children and adolescents with ADHD (Bunford, Evans and Wymbs, 2015). Asking such a child simply to “sit down and calm yourself” may therefore overlook the complexity of what regulation actually requires.

A creative activity may offer something different: somewhere for movement and attention to be directed rather than suppressed.

For an autistic child, the experience may be different again. The attraction may lie in repetition, visual pattern, sensory properties, predictability or the opportunity to engage deeply with a preferred interest.

This reminds us of something we have returned to throughout this series: regulation will not look the same for every child.

The activity itself is not what makes something regulating.

Its value depends upon the relationship between the activity, the individual child and what that child needs at that particular moment.

When We Stop Asking Children to Explain

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts creative expression can offer is freedom from the constant expectation to explain.

Children with additional needs can spend enormous amounts of time being questioned, prompted and assessed.

What do you want?

What happened?

Why did you do that?

How do you feel?

Tell me.

Show me.

Even when these questions are asked with the very best intentions, they can become exhausting.

Imagine experiencing something intensely but repeatedly being asked to translate that experience into a form somebody else understands.

Sometimes creativity allows us to remove that demand.

We can sit beside a child who is drawing without asking what the picture means. We can provide materials without deciding what they should make. We can allow a child to repeat the same creative activity because repetition itself may be meaningful or enjoyable.

For parents, this can require a different kind of presence.

We are not trying to extract information from the child.

We are simply creating a safe opportunity for expression and being available if communication emerges.

This is especially important when supporting non-speaking children. Communication is much broader than speech. A child may communicate through gesture, movement, facial expression, behaviour, AAC, objects, pictures and choices. Creative experiences can sit alongside these communication systems rather than replacing them.

And sometimes, when the pressure to talk disappears, something else happens.

Connection becomes possible without interrogation.

The parent and child can simply be alongside one another.

We Need to Be Careful About Interpretation

There is an important caution here.

Once we begin thinking about art and emotion, it can be tempting to interpret children’s creative work psychologically.

We may see a particular colour and assume it represents an emotion. We may notice something missing from a family drawing and wonder what it means. We may interpret repeated images as evidence of something happening beneath the surface.

This is not something parents should be expected to do.

Children’s artwork is influenced by imagination, preference, motor ability, developmental level, interests, sensory preferences and countless other factors. A picture cannot simply be “decoded” to reveal a child’s psychological state.

And this is where we need to distinguish between using creativity therapeutically at home and art therapy.

Art therapy is a professional psychological intervention in which appropriately trained practitioners use creative processes within a therapeutic relationship. Evidence examining art therapy with children suggests promising outcomes across several clinical populations, but the research remains heterogeneous and should be interpreted carefully (Cohen-Yatziv and Regev, 2019).

Parents do not need to become art therapists.

Nor should they try to analyse their child’s artwork.

What parents can provide is access to creative experiences that allow children to explore, make choices, engage their senses, communicate and simply create without being judged or assessed.

That can be valuable in itself.

Following the Child Rather Than the Activity

Just as we discussed with music last week, creativity is not automatically regulating simply because we intend it to be.

For some autistic children, finger painting may be wonderfully absorbing. For another child, wet paint on their hands may be intensely uncomfortable.

One child may enjoy the resistance of clay. Another may dislike its smell or texture.

A child with ADHD may become deeply engaged in a fast-moving creative activity but find a highly structured craft frustrating because it introduces another set of instructions they are expected to follow.

So rather than beginning with “What art activity helps autistic children regulate?”, perhaps we begin somewhere much more individual:

What does my child enjoy?

Not because we need to compile another list of strategies, but because preference tells us something about accessibility.

When we observe children carefully, they communicate their preferences in many ways. They return to particular materials. They reject others. They become absorbed in certain experiences and move away from others.

For children who communicate non-verbally, noticing these responses is particularly important.

Turning away is communication.

Pushing something aside is communication.

Returning repeatedly to an activity is communication.

Bringing a parent an object is communication.

Choosing one material over another is communication.

The more we learn to recognise these forms of communication, the less dependent we become upon the expectation that children must always tell us what they need in words.

And perhaps that is one of the deeper lessons running through this whole series.

We are not simply trying to teach children how to communicate in ways that make sense to us.

We also need to learn how they already communicate with us.

A Final reflection

There is something beautifully simple about giving a child permission to create without asking them to explain themselves.

It does not require expensive materials or carefully planned therapeutic activities. A pencil and paper, chalk, paint, clay, collage materials or building blocks may be enough — provided they are things the individual child actually enjoys.

The value is not in producing a perfect picture.

It is not in discovering what the picture “means”.

And it is certainly not in trying to turn every creative moment into therapy.

The value may simply be in providing another space where the child can experience themselves without having to perform, explain or get something right.

For parents of children who are non-speaking, have learning disabilities or experience communication differently, this can be particularly important.

Our children have emotional worlds whether or not those worlds are expressed through speech.

Our responsibility is not always to find the right question that will unlock those feelings.

Sometimes it is to provide enough safety, time and different forms of expression for the child to communicate in whatever way is accessible to them.

Last week, that language was music.

This week, it might be colour, shape, texture or movement.

And next week, we will explore perhaps the most natural language of childhood itself — play.

Because sometimes children cannot tell us what is happening inside them.

But if we are willing to look beyond words, they may already be showing us.

---

References

Bunford, N., Evans, S.W. and Wymbs, F. (2015) ‘ADHD and emotion dysregulation among children and adolescents’, Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 18(3), pp. 185–217.

Cohen-Yatziv, L. and Regev, D. (2019) ‘The effectiveness and contribution of art therapy work with children in 2018 – what progress has been made so far? A systematic review’, International Journal of Art Therapy, 24(3), pp. 100–112.

Kinnaird, E., Stewart, C. and Tchanturia, K. (2019) ‘Investigating alexithymia in autism: A systematic review and meta-analysis’, European Psychiatry, 55, pp. 80–89.

Moula, Z., Aithal, S., Karkou, V. and Powell, J. (2020) ‘A systematic review of child-focused outcomes and assessments of arts therapies delivered in primary mainstream schools’, Children and Youth Services Review, 112, 104928.