Six-year-old throwing an unspeakable tantrum? Ten-year-old suddenly acting reclusively? Rather than poking and prodding them with endless questions, have them pick up a paintbrush or pencil, suggests Sarah Brodie, art therapist and professor with Concordia University’s Department of Creative Arts Therapies. She’s rebranding the traditional time-out as an “art out.” “It’s so not about the aesthetics or the end image,” she tells CTV News. “It’s about a communication and I think if a parent gets into the groove of remembering how valuable that is...it’s just an immediate grounder [for the child].” Brodie continues, “Art is really just about how we take something from the realm of ideas or imagination and put it out there...That’s what we call the creative process that tells the world about a person.” She says in her experience, kids of all ages tend to be more amenable to taking their feelings to a piece of paper, especially when they’re struggling with their words. “If something’s coming out as language, it’s very workable,” she said. “If it’s coming out as behaviour, it’s unsayable - the kid can’t find a way to say it or doesn’t even want to gratify the room with that kind of articulation. They just want everyone to feel it.” Though artistry may come more innately to young children, Brodie points out that older kids can still be encouraged to get creative, particularly as their life experiences and ways of communicating change as they enter the teen years. “The witnessing of different lives, and every life is another world to me,” she said. “The weight of why a person crosses the threshold of wanting art therapy is often a sad story or a difficult story, and so I think that buoyancy...of the wonder of childhood is an antidote for the heaviness that comes with being a therapist who works with children.” Brodie admits that most children stop intrinsically using art as a creative outlet by the time they turn nine or 10. She explains that as toddlers, “there’s this blurry line at the beginning of our lives between fantasy and reality.” As kids age, “We want to be able to achieve a kind of realism, a good enough realism, and without a bit of kind of training in drawing, our drawings disappoint us too much,” she said. “That’s why, I think, we tail off around that age, some of us.” A world of wonder Brodie elucidates that there is a world of wonder within a child’s mind, and sometimes it just takes an opportunity to exercise creative liberty to release any worries, anxieties - or even happiness. “Oftentimes, I’m not giving a prompt, and the child will choose to draw something,” she said. “There’s not just motion but also cognition. You see how people think - any of us, really - even doodles...you can see the dynamics of our minds.” The strength of a pencil line or brush stroke can identify confidence or insecurity; colour can point to unadulterated bliss or inner turmoil. “The way that something’s drawn, a feathery line depicting a certain degree of a lack of confidence in this particular drawing or a million times erased,” she muses. “You can intuitively, when you see the drawing, especially when you see it being drawn, know a lot about the person.” Brodie calls art therapy a “mindfulness” of sorts, and encourages parents to employ her skills at home by prompting their children towards drawing if they’re unable to express themselves verbally. “Sometimes, parents will bring me those pictures, and it really does help me to see their family in the swing of things, to see what goes onto the page,” she said. “Sometimes it’s more of a grounding kind of exercise. It has nothing to do with the moment at hand, but just sitting down and doing something else.” Brodie notes that not all art has to be rooted in sadness, anger or anxiety. “It can be used communicatively, and this happens spontaneously too,” she said. “With loving pictures, so much love pours on the page.” Making her mark Even out of context, Brodie is able to look at a drawing and decipher the feeling behind it. “Look at that delight, and the two colours,” she says, observing a sketch by a two-year-old during her interview with CTV News (pictured above). “The joy of mark-making and filling the page. You feel it in that picture, where it’s this, ‘here I am, leaving my mark.’ There’s something satisfying about it, and that’s conveyed in the boisterousness of those scribbles.” Now a professor at Concordia University, Brodie admits she’s learned so much from her young patients. “There’s never a day where I don’t feel really transformed,” she said. “How is the client progressing in therapy? Am I changing? I feel like I’m learning.” She adds that seeing how much children grow and mature - even in small bursts from three to five to eight years old - reminds her of how precious those moments are. “You can ask an eight-year-old, ‘Are you a different person from when you were five?’ and they’re like, ‘so much,’” she said. “Children hold that sense of awe and wonder of all of simple things, as well as the everyday, and so, that’s definitely the win of being an art therapist.”
