Coloring Is Not a Time-Filler

Coloring has a reputation problem. It is what you produce when the restaurant is slow. It sits in the same category as the tablet, only quieter and with less guilt attached.

There is a case that it is doing more than that. The case is real but smaller than the internet claims, so let us do the claims and the limits together.

The study everyone cites

In 2005, Curry and Kasser induced mild anxiety in participants and then had them colour one of three things: a mandala, a plaid pattern, or a blank page however they liked.

Anxiety dropped in all three groups, but it dropped more in the two structured-pattern groups than in the free-colouring group. The authors suggested that colouring a reasonably complex, structured pattern induces something like a meditative state.

What we think is actually going on

The interesting thing about colouring is less neurological than situational. A child colouring is in a very particular state:

• Hands busy, mouth free. This is the single most underrated fact about craft activities. Children talk while colouring in a way they do not talk while facing you.
• No possibility of failure. The lines are already there. Nothing can go wrong, which is rarer in a child’s day than adults remember.
• No eye contact required. Same mechanism as the car. Difficult things get said sideways.
• An adult can sit alongside and do their own page, which is not supervision, it is company.

The crayon is not the intervention. The conversation the crayon makes possible is the intervention.

Which is why our coloring books have words on the page

There are eight Cuties books and each one is built around a feeling — brave, calm, confident, and so on — rather than around an animal. The animal is why a child picks the book up. The feeling is why we made it.

On the pages you get four things together: something to colour, a genuinely fun fact, a short affirmation, and a question. The question is the load-bearing element. “When do you feel brave?” asked across a kitchen table, to a child who is not looking up, gets answers that a direct conversation never would.

How to get more out of twenty minutes of colouring

1. Sit down and colour too. Badly. Your page being worse than theirs is a feature.
2. Do not comment on the output. “That’s lovely” ends conversations. “Why did you pick purple for him?” continues them.
3. Ask the question on the page out loud, then answer it yourself first.
4. Let it be silent. Not every session needs to produce insight. Some of them are just twenty peaceful minutes, and twenty peaceful minutes is a legitimate outcome.

The bottom line

We are not going to tell you colouring is clinically proven to calm children, because it is not, and the study everyone waves around was done on undergraduates.

What we will tell you is that it reliably produces a calm child with free hands sitting next to an adult, which is one of the better configurations available in family life. What you do with that configuration is up to you.