Painting with a 6- and 5-Year-Old Is Not About the Painting

It was raining, so the outdoor plan dissolved. With three kids, you must invent something before the house turns feral.

I had been thinking about painting with our kids again. The last time we tried to do it for real, Jio was still a baby. Now he is six. Mari is five. Already this feels impossible to me.

Lately I have been into flowers. I collect pictures of them on my phone, grow them from seed in the garden, and notice the wild ones along the forest around our home. There is a lot of green in our kitchen: the porch door, the large window, the trees pressing their color inward. It makes sense to paint something green too. Grass. Brush. Wildflowers. A little field. I enjoy being ambitious.

I showed them pictures of New England wildflowers on my computer. We chose a few. I put on Ghibli piano music. We started with the background, an abstract green to hold everything else. I gave them brushes, but their fingers were allowed too. This was the easy part. No detail yet. Just color. Fill the page. We put newspaper on the ground and painted right up to the edge, filling emptiness until it became a place.

Still, I could feel my own anxious need to structure and plan the painting before it could become itself. Is that green they placed the right green? Should that splotch of yellow disappear? But the green kept spreading anyway, and for a moment I let it. Darker green for depth. Some movement. Some air. When the background dried, we began the flowers.

This was harder for me. Yellow, purple, white. The colors were now distinct from green, and therefore dangerous. One large patch could take over everything. I wanted them to be free, but not completely. I wanted wildness with a little fence around it.

The stems were harder still. Dark green, thin, careful. Almost immediately, part of me thought, Oh no. The lines were too thick, too simple, not what I had imagined.

“Just a little.”

“Light touch!”

“Not too much.”

“Be gentle!”

“Remember, little strokes.”

I could hear myself trying to protect the painting from them, and also trying to protect them from my own control.

Later I watched a video I had taken so I could remember. I heard myself saying, “Good job guys! Keep going!” I sounded so proud and happy. Then Mari said quietly, almost under her breath, “I can’t see the stem anymore.”

I had missed it.

I think she wanted the paint to keep moving the way she imagined it: thick, wet, continuous, bold. The paint ran out before she finished the stroke. I wish I had heard her frustration in the moment. I wish I had helped her solve it. But I am also trying to forgive that. Even when I am trying to be present, I miss things. Even surrender has its failures.

And still, they were just children painting on a rainy morning.

I like teaching. I like guiding. I like gauging the distance between my hand and theirs. Not so close that I take over. Not so far that they are alone with the problem. This is a difficult distance to keep.

I love art, but making art with children exposes something in me: the doctor, the parent, the tired person who wants the setup to be worth it. Make a good painting. Make the time count. Make the mess meaningful.

But art does not really obey that. And children definitely do not.

For them, the point was the feel of the brush. The color spreading. The surprise of wet paint becoming a flower or not becoming one. The pleasure of choosing purple. The feeling of starting with emptiness and ending with fullness. These feelings do not require a perfect flower.

I think this is one of the secret practices of parenting: to stand close enough to help, but not so close that your hand becomes the only hand. To let a child make a mark that you would not have made. To let the painting become worse in one way and better in another.

The painting is on the wall now. I do not know how long it will stay there. Maybe we will move it. Maybe the sun will fade it little by little over the years. But I want to remember this: the rain, the green peering into our kitchen, the piano, their small hands, the brushwork, my restraint, my failure, their concentration. The quiet fact that for one morning we made something together.

There is something about art and surrendering. I am glad I kept this memory somewhere the sun cannot fade it.