How Children View the World

The warm weather has brought out the nice group of children (mostly grammar school age) in my neighborhood, and their buckets of chalk. As long as I have lived here they have used our cul-de-sac as a canvas for chalk drawings—more often than not, they are large-scale layouts of houses, living spaces, etc.

And they were out in force late yesterday afternoon. This morning, while putting a letter in the mail box, I stopped to look at what they had drawn. It looks to be a cityscape that covers the entire cul-de-sac. I was intrigued to note the kinds of venues they had included:

"McDonald's," "Subway," and "Starbucks:"

"Target" and "Wal-Mart:"

These tabula rasa (blank slate—a slight misuse of the original term) type drawings remind me of the therapy employed with children in post-trauma settings, where therapists give them blank paper and crayons and ask them to "draw" in order to get a glimpse of their worldview.

If you give modern children—at least this group of modern children—a bucket of chalk and a blank asphalt canvas and let them draw "their world," it's interesting to see what it includes. In the cityscape drawn by my neighbors' children, I was interested in what was included as well as not included. The only things labeled were the five commercial establishments I photographed above. There were no churches or houses of worship, hospitals, libraries, fire stations, schools, parks, gardens, or farms—just three fast-food outlets and two big box retailers. (Maybe they ran out of time and daylight before putting in the venues I note as missing. Even so, it's interesting to see what they drew and labeled first.)

I'm not going to jump to any large conclusions based on what they labeled, but I will say I found it interesting. Fast food and big box retailing. Is that how the average child today views the world?