Lead
Many parents quietly swap out the drawings on the refrigerator every week or two. At first: a tangle of lines that ran off the edge of the paper. Half a year later: loops that closed into circles. Half a year after that: two lines growing from a circle — and the child announced it was "daddy."
Judging those drawings as "good" or "bad" is probably the wrong lens. The path from scribble to human figure is the record of motor control, visual memory, and symbolic function developing in parallel, all of it written out on paper. There is no such thing, in this framework, as "a period when the drawing is poor."
This article draws on foundational research to map the stages children's drawing passes through, and takes a look at how the old idea that you can measure intelligence from a child's drawing fares under modern scrutiny.