I was a firefighter for many years. But because it was more than a decade ago, it often seems like another person wore those turnout boots, cinched that ax belt and ran into burning buildings. Yet when the Covid-19 pandemic hit a few months ago, my old first-responder instincts rose up.
I wanted to be of use. But I’d let my E.M.T. certification lapse, so the only thing I was really good for was staying at home. This was important, of course, but as someone trained to spring into action in the face of death and destruction, it also left me restless and dispirited. I became that annoying friend who harangued you about food supplies early on and inserted the numbers of daily deaths and projected casualties into every conversation, so that even my own family told me that I made them anxious and that they wouldn’t speak to me unless I stopped.
Once schools started to close, my wife, the illustrator Wendy MacNaughton, wondered whether we could offer a free live drawing class for kids. For a week, she said, a half-hour every school day. Why not, I thought. It wasn’t the front lines. But it would be a nice distraction. It would be a service to the harried parents. Besides I was the only other human in the house. Someone had to hold the camera.
We used what we had on hand: a smartphone and Instagram Live. It was a rinky-dink operation, but these were rinky-dink times. Kids love Wendy in real life (though we ourselves are kidless) and sure enough, once the camera turned on, Wendy was just the person you’d want your children to hang out with during a pandemic: funny, carefree, willing to wear an assortment of colorful hats, yet also steady and soothing.
The response was immediate. Parents were grateful for what I saw as cyberbabysitting. One week of videos turned into two, then three. And something strange happened. What first seemed to me to be a simple feel-good endeavor for children — Grab some crayons! Draw a dinosaur! — was actually something more.
“The first time I’ve seen him relax and focus today,” one adult said of her child, via email. Another said, “We are only a week into this home schooling thing and drawing is the only thing that my daughter is still interested in.” For all of us life had turned strange, but for kids this new reality resembled a sudden, undeserved timeout — play dates were prohibited, outdoor sports were canceled, simple routines were now upended. Yet something about drawing was providing a much-needed intervention. “My 7-year-old usually can’t sit still for five minutes,” a caregiver wrote. “But he draws for the whole 30 minutes.”
It helped that Wendy’s on-camera persona was a mixture of Mr. Rogers and a Cirque du Soleil unicyclist. She instinctively understood when to draw calming spirals and when to scribble wildly. Her rambunctious illustrations, silly dances and rotating art smocks, along with her there-are-no-mistakes-in-art attitude clicked with her kid audience. “Swoop outside the lines! Put polka dots on that tiger!” she’d exclaim. But there was something besides a zany master of ceremonies going on here. Adults reported that their children were drawing long after class was over. This was about the act of artmaking itself.
“It’s a symbolic language for your internal world,” Sarah Rubin, a psychotherapist who has been incorporating art into her work for decades, said when I asked why drawing was so absorbing for children during this crisis. “Everything that’s going on gets lodged unconsciously. This is a way to get it out and on paper. Now you can speak about the drawing instead of what’s hard to talk about.”
Ms. Rubin pointed out that, unlike many traumas, such as 9/11, the coronavirus is unfolding slowly. While this is agonizing for many, it is also an opportunity: Kids can work out their emotions while it is happening. This allows a head start on adjustment and healing. “The sooner the better,” she emphasized. “Not down the road.” Ms. Rubin also lauds the kinetic experience that drawing offers. “Art is movement in space,” she explained, much more enthralling than the two-dimensional computer screen used for online schooling.
Research backs up Ms. Rubin’s insights. A 2014 study by Judy Rollins and Ermyn King showed that the children of wounded soldiers who engaged in art activities, including drawing, during hospital visits, communicated better with their injured parent and adjusted faster to their disrupted environment. Other studies show that drawing allows children to visually work out ideas about the surrounding world at a time in their development when the ability to articulate can be outpaced by cascading emotions. Hand a kid colored pencils, in other words, and the trepidation and confusion of the coronavirus pandemic transmutes into striped penguins and swirling fuchsia lines.
School in its various forms is finishing up around the country, giving way to an uncertain summer. This week our #DrawTogether classes ended, too. We graduated tens of thousands of kids from over 40 countries who had drawn dragons and treehouses and heart spirals with us over the past 12 weeks. But the pandemic has not ended. Children will continue to miss their friends, mourn their absent playgrounds and community pools, and absorb adult stresses. Yet when Wendy asked if we should continue as “art camp,” I hesitated at first.
Just months ago, I was a writer; now, I was someone who worried about glare, whether the family dog would wear a weird hat for the class, and how to pan from paint set to paper. Sometimes I didn’t recognize myself (or my wife, who was now stopped on the street by 6-year-olds). But the pandemic, while disorienting, is also full of surprises. We pitch in where it matters, and a truer self can emerge. In my small way, I’ve been a first responder all along; drawing, it’s become clear, is vital first aid for kids.
Caroline Paul (@carowriter) is the author, most recently, of “You Are Mighty: A Guide to Changing the World.”
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