I love this article. I love the analysis that has gone into the topic of throwing children’s artwork out – or “filing it in the sky” as my friend calls it in code.
AFTER careful consideration, Jessica Hanff has found the ideal spot for the art that her 4-year-old daughter, Elisabeth, brings home from preschool: the trash can.
“We’re getting two to four pieces of crayon drawing a day,” said Ms. Hanff, a 36-year-old operations manager for an academic research institute. On a recent Tuesday, Ms. Hanff began sorting through a few dozen of Elisabeth’s drawings, stacked in the mudroom of the family’s Washington home.
“These are printouts off the computer, colored in,” she said. “C is for Cat! And she’s scribbled some things on it. This is Dora the Explorer.” Ms. Hanff stopped to observe the purplish rings that Elisabeth had marked around Dora’s eyes. “It looks like someone slapped her in the face. She’s got these big shiners.”
Ms. Hanff is always on the lookout for “exceptional” drawings. But this entire batch would soon be archived in the rubbish bin. “I’m not sentimental about those at all,” she said. “It’s my job to avoid raising a hoarder, and I’m leading by example.”
But Elisabeth has been known to fish her drawings out of the trash and present them to her mother. “I’ll say, ‘Oh, thank you,’ ” Ms. Hanff said. “We’ll have a discussion. I’m not callous. But once she turns away, often I’ll toss it out again.”
blue milk 
I feel the same way…unless something really stands out, there’s no way I’m holding on to every single scribble. BUT…might Ms. Hanff consider putting them in the recycling bin rather than the trash can?? That’s a lot of paper to be throwing away!
When my sister was living with us, she was a teacher at a preschool, and her solution for all of the art the kids gave her (not even her kids!) was to string it up all over her room, with clothespins. As she gathered more artwork, she’d recycle the oldest and pin the newest.
Obviously that decorating technique won’t work for everyone, but it was fairly effective (and cheap) for her.
This an issue for us and almost everyone we know! For now we can stick a lot of it up around the back part of the house which is mainly a playroom for now. However, the problem is not the paintings but the 3-D creations the kids glue together at kindy. It’s pretty impossible to display those and we have to gradually dispose of them…
One of our fellow kinder parents told me she sits down with the kid, they talk and dissasemmble, then return the parts to kinder for making into new things.
We also take photos or videos of the kid talking about his creations and recycle the original object.
You could try taking digital pics of it as well to store well done pieces.
I use my kids’ “less exceptional” drawings (oh, what a mean, callous parent I am!) for my grocery and to-do lists. Makes me feel a little less bad about throwing them into the recycling bin (if the paper is recyclable). And the fact that I have sparkly/colorful/Darth Vader-adorned grocery lists ain’t too shabby either.
I just got a big box of my own scrawlings from my parents. It feels wrong to throw out a book filled with traces of my 5 year old hand, but what am I going to do with it? I secretly wish it had been thrown out 20 years ago.
I’m a nanny (not a mum, yet), my technique is to *ask* the child what they want to keep – for most children, making art is about the process more than the product and they have no interest in keeping it, unless they’re taught that it’s sad/bad to throw it out – with those kids lego tends to be a huge pain in the ass too because they don’t want to break their work up to put it away. Some parents make more of a fuss about their kid’s finished products than the kids do.
In general though, I’ve found that except for a few of the children I’ve worked with, kids are happy to recycle or throw out their “artworks” unless they have put a lot of work or thought into them, or they are special for some reason. I do think it’s nice to keep a few special pieces.
Digital pics are a great idea too – though you can end up hoarding those, at least they take up less physical space.
[…] is, and she does it everywhere, all the time. She just makes art out of anything and everything. Constantly. Like my business cards, cut up into tiny dioramas. Quite clever and nice to look at, but she […]