Child as Totem: Redressing the Myth of Inherent Creativity in Early Childhood

Abstract

In this article, I present a reexamination of the myth of inherent creativity in early childhood to elucidate how still-dominant discourses of optimization such as child development, individualism, expression, creativity, and visual realism exert limiting pressures on understandings of the art and visual culture that children consume and create. The article contributes to a repositioning of young children’s art and visual culture as legitimate sites of cultural and knowledge production in order to ameliorate a restrictive view of child art in which children’s art is characterized as either pure expression or a movement through stages toward visual realism.