A Simple Experiment You Can Try at Home

Yesterday, my three-year-old decided to do a drawing for me. After much effort, he presented it to me proudly at the computer. I, being a right-thinking modern parent, praised it lavishly and taped it up beside the terminal. He looked on, delighted.

It’s quite an interesting piece, really: a green spiral with many smaller green lines going back and forth along its length. I’m pretty sure it represents a snake, and it is actually visually interesting. Were I an art critic, I’d say it had texture, or some such thing. Certainly it took him a lot of time and concentration to do. It seems to me the product of some inspiration.

Of course, given such praise, he immediately took another piece of paper, and did another drawing. This one was a lot simpler and drawn much more quickly. But, being a modern, right-thinking parent, I gave him the same reward, and it went up just above the previous one. The contrast is striking: I would have thought, if I had not known, that it had been done by a much younger child than he first.

Then he did another. And another, And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. They are taped all around me as I type, showing a perfectly consistent progression, from the great detail of the first to something quite simple and basic: just a few squiggly lines. The last few were done in almost the time it took me to tape them up.

Any parent can try this obvious experiment at home, and, I wager, see the same result. Moral: rewards earned too easily just teach laziness. The “self-esteem” movement is likely to reduce our children’s level of accomplishment.

Or, to put it in terms of good old eternally unfashionable common sense, spare the rod and spoil the child.

Second moral: all art comes from suffering. Suffering is transformative, redemptive. Show me a creative person, and I’ll show you an unhappy childhood.