2.9 year old does not want do coloring

Question

My son is 2.9 years old and he is not interested to do coloring. We have tried to do everything to increase his interest for coloring, but day by day it has deteriorated. Please give me any suggestion.

Answer 1

Making someone want to do something is an art that not many accomplish.

Psychologists would recommend that you use the intrinsic motivation and enhance that. Trying to push an interest externally is often bound to fail. The harder you push another person towards something, the stronger the resistance, so pick your battles wisely - you have many years of child rearing ahead of you where you will sometimes have to break through this resistance, but you should do it only if absolutely necessary.

You need to assess what your child can already do and where he struggles, then start there.

A few points to consider:

• Does he have the manual dexterity to hold and guide the pen in a way that he can already color? Or is he not yet able to do so, is unhappy with the results of his attempts and gets frustrated disproportionately?

If so, letting him experiment with drawing and painting freely on a large paper can help him develop the skills that later make “staying inside the lines” way easier. Offer different pens, brushes, crayon blocks… that way he can experiment and as a side effect learn how to grip each of them properly.

• Does he have the self-control to sit calmly at a table, or is he so full of energy that he needs to be running around and burn that energy?

Then provide plenty of occasions to play and exercise. You can also offer sidewalk chalks and encourage him to do larger-scale drawings on the ground, on walls, windows or large boards that involve more and larger motions than sitting and making just small hand and arm movements.
Keep sessions of sitting on the table short, so that he can build up the ability to do so slowly. He will have to learn how to sit calmly at a desk for school eventually, but it doesn’t happen overnight and not through pressure.

• Does he like the motives you want him to color?

Probably the obvious suggestion is to let him choose.

• Does he see a “sense” in the exercise? One of my kids once asked me why the heck he should be coloring / drawing something. You need to see a purpose to be motivated.

Kids drawings make great gifts for relatives and you can make an “art gallery” in your home - the cliche refrigerator decoration or an ever changing exhibit in some other, reasonably prominent place.

We usually don’t allow frame challenge answers, but have you asked yourself why you think a child that’s not yet three needs to color? Some children never want to, and that’s fine in my experience. (Yes, I know some preschools will push children towards it.) Mine both were profoundly disinterested in coloring, yet one of my children now is a quite good manga artist in her free time - completely self-motivated.

Answer 2

Creative development is very important for children, and it means that parents should try a lot of different activities with their kids. Painting, sculpting, sewing, and so on - there are so many things to choose, for any age. When your child does not want to try something, it is not a reason to worry about, just try something new, and he will surely choose the right activity.

By the way, you can avoid traditional coloring and suggest a non-traditional approach, for example, use food coloring dyes, paint old CDs, blow liquid dye around on paper or other surfaces - there is plenty of ideas on the web.