Picture of the world in lullabies and drawings of young children

Leaving the mother’s womb, a newborn person becomes part of the most complex system of intersecting, adjacent, built on top of each other and interacting in various ways. Some of these worlds are clearly visible, while others, such as the world of mental life, being invisible, are embodied in the material of other worlds, thus becoming visible, sensually perceived.

In order to learn how to live and successfully act in the world, a person entering life needs to realize the multidimensional universe presented to him as an intelligible whole, in relation to which he will self-determine, look for his place in it and pave his own paths. This is impossible in the absence of the most important spatial and semantic landmarks, generalizing the scheme of the universe and ideas about one’s location in it. Any human culture necessarily carries a model of the world created by a given ethno-cultural community of people. This model of the world is embodied in myths, reflected in the system of religious beliefs, reproduced in rites and rituals, enshrined in language, materialized in the planning of human settlements and the organization of the internal space of dwellings. Each new generation inherits a certain model of the universe, which serves as a support for building an individual picture of the world for each individual and at the same time unites these people as a cultural community.

On the one hand, a child receives such a model of the world from adults, actively learns from the cultural, objective and natural environment, on the other hand, actively builds it himself, at a certain moment uniting in this work with other children.

Folklorists, ethnographers, culturologists can tell a lot about the models of the world of the ancient Egyptians and Aztecs, Australian aborigines and the peoples of Siberia, but the question of how and by whom is formed and what constitutes the model of the world of modern children is covered with the darkness of the unknown to a much greater extent than model of the world of the Aleutian Eskimos.

There are three main factors that determine the formation of a child’s world model. The first is the influence of «adult» culture, the active conductors of which are, first of all, parents, and then other educators.

The second is the personal efforts of the child himself, manifested in various types of his intellectual and creative activity.

The third is the impact of the children’s subculture, the traditions of which are passed down from generation to generation of children and are extremely significant between the ages of five and twelve for understanding how to master the world around.

The model of the world of any person, even a small child, is accessible to external perception only on the condition that it is somehow embodied, «externalized», materialized — in the form of a story, drawing, deed, etc. Analyzing them, an experienced observer with a certain degree of certainty can reconstruct the inner content of the mental life of another person, in particular, find out some features of his picture of the world.

If an adult (for example, a teacher) wants to introduce a child to a certain system of worldview principles, and hence a certain model of the world order, then he must necessarily embody it in the form of a verbal, pictorial or behavioral text (story, song, fable, picture, model of behavior). etc.), which can be assimilated as easily and fully as possible by the student.

In this chapter, we will look at how the formation of a model of the world begins in young children from birth to three years and from three years to five. Modern parents often do not at all imagine the enormity of the volume of the inner work that the child does during this period in order to streamline his ideas about the world. Therefore, in two illustrative examples, we will get acquainted with the two sides of this process. First, let’s see how help can be provided by adults and how worldview content can be conveyed in a text addressed to a small child. In this regard, the experience of folk culture is instructive, in which the construction of the basic coordinate system began immediately after the baby was born. On the example of the analysis of the texts of Russian maternal folklore, we will get acquainted with the traditional ways of helping a child in the psychological structuring of the space of the world around him and understanding his place in it. And then we will consider how the independent creation of a model of the world begins on the example of children’s drawings, when the child himself masters a cultural instrument — in this case, a pictorial language through which he expresses his understanding of the world order.

The initiators of the world-building work of the child are adults: it is they who introduce him into the world of material culture and native language, which in various forms represent the most important spatial and semantic coordinates that help the child organize and realize his direct (primarily bodily) personal experience.

In the course of socialization, the child experiences many explicit and implicit guiding influences from adults. These are systems of prohibitions and rewards, expressed not only through language, but also existing as a given and objectified in the very organization of a specific children’s space (cot, children’s room, playground) as an area fenced off and delimited from forbidden spatial dimensions. No less powerful means of forming spatial consciousness and a source of basic elements of the ethno-cultural concept of the world order is the native language.

The linguistic ordering of the child’s direct spatial experience begins already at the very early stages of mastering the vocabulary and grammar of his native language. In addition, educators use special “modeling” texts in which the child is given a semantic scheme of the space of the world in a figurative and accessible form. In this regard, the tradition of folk pedagogy is of particular interest to the psychologist.

Russian folk culture was characterized by the desire to give the child the basic guidelines as early as possible, for the future, long before he would practically master this world himself. The construction of a child’s picture of the world began already in infancy through maternal folklore addressed to him — lullabies, pestles, nursery rhymes, etc. They were supposed to provide the child with a holistic worldview and a sense of being included in the general order of the universe, i.e. to set a certain system of basic coordinates that help the child to self-determine in vital relations with the world.

At first, the child does not exist for himself, being, as it were, a “blind spot”. The first stage in a person’s awareness of the fact of his existence in this world begins through other people. It is they who notice that «I» is, highlighting the child from the background of the surrounding life as a significant figure and naming him by name. Such a personal appeal is constantly present in the texts of maternal folklore addressed to the child.

Pestushki, nursery rhymes, sentences accompany bodily games with a small child in folk culture.

“The magpie-crow cooked porridge, fed the children: she gave it, she gave it …” — so the mother or nanny says, fingering the fingers of the child sitting on her lap. From a psychological point of view, the importance of these games is invaluable. In this way, the adult helps the child form a meaningful image of his own body.

The image of your bodily «I» is the basis for the development of the personality of the baby (as well as for the life of the personality of an adult). After all, the presence of a body is a criterion for the truth of the statement «I exist.» At the same time, the body is the starting point of reference necessary for the orientation of a person in the surrounding physical world, and, as we will see later, the main measuring device that all people use in the process of mastering the physical space.

In bodily games with children, which exist in the folk tradition, the mother helps the child to feel and emotionally live separate parts of his body in live contact with her hands. The child’s fingers, palms, forearms, armpits, head, etc. become characters in story games, each of which has its own name and character and performs a specific role.

It is very important that these body parts get their names in the game — names that are repeated many times in different ways. Naming gives the body parts of the child a new quality of existence, they acquire a new status. First, they become meaningful elements of the image of the bodily «I», which begins to be perceived as a stable set of tactile, kinesthetic, visual, vestibular and similar sensations, gradually developing into a holistic image. And as the child learns not only to feel directly, but also to know where and how many eyes, ears, fingers, mouths, noses he has, as he memorizes their names, the invariability of their location and relative position — his body begins to take shape. The body schema is already generalized and combined into a sign structure of knowledge about the body — something like a large-scale map of the bodily landscape, on which the most important points are indicated. The construction of such a «map» of one’s own body is undoubtedly a product of acculturation and systematization of the child’s psycho-corporeal experience, purposefully occurring in the process of his communication with his mother or nanny.

A child’s understanding of the structure of his bodily “I” is absolutely necessary for normal mental and personal development. It is no coincidence that in folk culture this process was directed and controlled by tradition. For centuries, texts of maternal folklore addressed to children have been passed down from generation to generation. They turned out to contain the most successful in terms of content and form ways of teaching a child to understand his own body. Figurative, rhymed, easy-to-remember texts of pestles, nursery rhymes, finger games were well known. That is why even the most stupid and negligent teacher who used them, willy-nilly, developed the child in accordance with the cultural program for mastering the space of the bodily “I” laid down in these texts.

If we turn to other genres of maternal folklore, such as lullabies, then we will also find the presence of cultural programs there, the purpose of which is the symbolic representation of the main spatial coordinates of the world into which the child entered after birth.

Ordering, structuring space begins with fixing the point at which the child is located. In lullaby songs, the cradle is often described in great detail and exaggeratedly positively — the child’s first own place in this world, his initial personal space.

hanging cradle

High on a hook.

golden hook,

Velvet belts,

twisted rings,

Golden hooks.

And gold hooks, and velvet belts, of course, are not everyday realities of peasant life. They figuratively express the kinship of a child’s cradle and the royal throne. The child here is like a small deity, surrounded by valuable gifts — festive food:

Oh, dolls-dolls-dolls,

At the head of the pretzels

Apples in the hands

Gingerbread in the legs

On the sides of the candy,

Branches of grapes.

In lullabies of this type, the highest quality and value of the place occupied by the child are affirmed, and infancy is described as an ideal state of well-being.

Indeed, for a full-fledged mental development, it is extremely important for a child to establish himself in the fact that the place occupied by his “I” in this world is the best, mother is the best, home is the most dear. The main personal task of the infantile period is the formation of the so-called «basic trust in life» — a person’s intuitive confidence that life is good and life is good, and if it gets bad, they will help him, he will not be abandoned. The infant acquires confidence in his desirability, security, in the guarantee of a positive response of the surrounding world to his needs in the course of everyday interactions with his mother. The constancy of the presence of the mother, the accuracy of her understanding of the needs of the infant and the speed of response to them, the warmth of the attitude towards the child, the variety of bodily and verbal communication with the mother have a very important meaning for his entire future life. On this deep feeling of basic trust in life, then the life optimism of an adult, his desire to live in the world in spite of all adversities and his irrational confidence that everything will end well, despite the circumstances, will be based. Conversely, the absence of this feeling may in the future lead to a refusal to fight for life even when victory is possible in principle.

In maternal folklore of lullabies, the starting point in the world coordinate system is the child lying in his cradle, and the space of the surrounding world is built around the child through the opposition of a warm house-protection, inside which there is a cradle with a baby, and a dangerous outside world — a dark forest, meadow , rivers, where for the time being the child does not need to go.

These two worlds are separated by a border that a child should not cross. It is denoted by the concept of «edge»:

Hush, Little Baby, Do not Say a Word,

Do not lie on the edge:

A gray top will come,

He will grab the barrel,

And drag it into the woods

And put it under a bush.

The outer boundary of the house already belongs to the outer dangerous world. Careless domestic chicken, which foolishly settled down to sleep on a mound — i.e. outside the house? — can lose all its beauty due to a robbery attack by an owl — a forest bird:

Black hen ripples

Slept on the mound

The owl has flown

Earrings turned out

Plucked feathers.

In general, the folklore concept of the edge as the border of the transition from one’s own space to the space of the outside world — dangerous, scary — also symbolically shapes the everyday experience of a small child.

The theme of the region as the most important bodily-spatial problem, the baby begins to live very early. Since the baby usually lies on something elevated, he has where to fall over the edge, which he feels as the boundary of the height difference, the transition of which threatens to fall. This real danger is first of all known during the first two years of life. Physical experiences of this kind become for the child a living psychological filler of the folklore idea of ​​the region as a dangerous facet of two different worlds. From the point of view of folk tradition, approaching it, and even more so prematurely crossing it, while the child is small and not ready for it, is absolutely impossible.

I must say that the concept of «edge» is unusually psychologically capacious. Among the keywords necessary for the formation of the personality of the child, he must be given one of the first places in importance.

One of the areas of a child’s life where the concept of «edge» is significant is his bodily-motor behavior, which we have already mentioned. Here, the recognition of the edge as the boundary of a specific space — one’s own and someone else’s, mastered and unknown, comfortable and dangerous — is lived by the child through the experience of his own body.

In addition, the concept of «edge» (in scientific terminology — «border», «contour») is central to understanding how young children’s perception of the world around them and themselves is formed.

Perception is a basic cognitive process that is built on the basis of the joint work of individual sense organs. The results of such joint activity of vision, touch, hearing, etc. are images of perception — a kind of «picture» of reality. In general psychology, it is well known that for constructing the image of a perceived object, its contour has a special informational value.

As soon as the learning child-observer becomes able to distinguish contours, i.e. the edges of individual things, from the general background of the surrounding world, its perception becomes objective. He sees the world no longer as a chaos of indistinct moving and static spots (which is typical of very tiny children), but as a container of separate objects, each of which has its own outlines, a border that separates it from the background of everything else.

This ability to isolate the edge of an object, which helps to perceive it as a separate integrity, is gradually formed in the child on the basis of his experience of manipulating objects. According to the physiologist I.M. Semenov, a moving hand always first teaches the eye: the cognitive actions of the child’s hands, which grab and feel the edges of an object, teach the eyes the same strategy of behavior. The eyes will soon learn to explore the contour of the visible object with the help of hand-like «groping» movements, but already at a distance. Each object, thus acquiring its place, its shape and edges, is different for the child from others. Thus, the object has its own face, and a little later its name — a name that helps the child to identify it.

So, the selection of the edge as the border of the object determines the success of the formation of object perception. This is the basis of the child’s ability to navigate in the space of the outside world.

Summarizing the content of the mental experience of young children related to the topic of the edge described above, we can say that the “edge” is apparently one of the earliest and most felt by the child characteristics of space, which is the basis of his worldview.

It is all the more striking with what psychological sensitivity the theme of the region in maternal folklore is introduced into the text addressed to the child and symbolically comprehended by folk tradition. Here the «edge» plays the role of a key element in the spatial-symbolic «maps of the world» with which the traditional culture of adults supplies young children ahead of time.

In lullabies, the word «edge» becomes a concept denoting the border of one’s own world — home, protected — and alien external, dangerous.

Lullabies were listened to not only by infants, but also by older children who already had an independent experience of knowing the real edges, edges, boundaries of all kinds of objects, the experience of their own falls and overstepping over the edge, knowing the instability of objects placed on the edge, the validity of parental prohibitions associated with the real location of the child on the edge of something. All this living diversity of individual experience saturates the concept of «edge» with personal meaning for the child.

On the other hand, introducing the child to the folklore understanding of the topic of the region raised his personal experience to the height of cultural and symbolic generalization and gave this concept also a magical meaning. Such semantic shades are able to catch a child older than two or three years — at this age, the active formation of the symbolic function of consciousness begins, which is also manifested in the products of the own creativity of young children.

Let’s leave the lullabies for now and jump ahead a bit, when the child grows up enough to listen to and understand fairy tales. We will immediately discover that in folk tales the theme of the land as the boundary between the home and the outside world is psychologically elaborated in great detail. Even from a small repertoire of fairy tales known to the modern urban younger preschooler, he can learn how to cross this border in different ways, depending on the circumstances and the degree of readiness of the protagonist to leave the home.

Kolobok, ruddy and “ready”, the “parents” themselves put on the window — the border of the house and the outside world — to get cold. He lay-lay, he became bored. And then he — hop! — from the window to the mound, from the mound to the yard, from the yard to the gate — and rolled along the road. So, he left his home already ready and, of his own free will, rolled out onto the road of life, where dramatic incidents happened to him related to how Kolobok acted when he met other characters in this fairy tale.

Another thing is the youngest son from the fairy tale «Puss in Boots». He is very young, although he received an inheritance from his dead parents and must leave the house on his own path of life, since the two older brothers inherited the house and the mill. But, as a modern psychologist would say, the youngest son faces typical youthful problems. He envies his older brothers and is very worried that he will have to go out into the world with no one knows what — a cat in a poke. He thinks his parents cheated him. The main events of the tale are related to how the son gradually discovers the value of the parental inheritance for himself — after all, they left him a magical assistant who earns his master wealth, wife, and power.

But poor Little Thumb and his brothers are not at all ready to go out into the world, they are still very small for this. Their father takes them away from their home, because they have nothing to feed them. Therefore, for these small children, the outside world appears as a thicket of a dark forest, where they enter the house of an ogre.

So, we see that at a new age stage in the life of a child-listener, the theme of the region develops further in fairy-tale folklore texts, where new psychological tasks associated with it are revealed. This is no longer an edge as a magical line that cannot even be approached, but a border that will someday have to be crossed in order to enter the world of adulthood.

By the way, if we go back to the world of lullabies, we will notice that only the baby is in danger outside the home, because he is small, «not ready.» Adult people, as well as some animals and mythological characters, can freely move and act in the outside world. From there they bring the child gifts, food, health, sleep, as well as boots, in which he will then independently enter the road of life.

In many lullabies, the prospect of his future independent, adult life unfolds before the child, where he will find a family, work, feed and support his own children and parents. Here he is given the structure of the social space in which he will find a place for himself, as well as the moral categories of his relationship with the younger, with the elders and with the patron saints. That is, a system of relations is laid in the space of the world of people, the goals of a child’s life are determined, as well as its boundaries and its finiteness.

Thus, the lullaby gives the child in advance the simplest scheme of the picture of the world, introduces the alignment of forces personified in the images of people, animals, mythological characters, and the main principles that should guide a person entering the path of life.

Let’s talk now about the psychological features of the live perception of folklore texts by a child. In addition to their content, much is determined by the very situation in which they are performed.

A mother, grandmother or nanny sings a lullaby in the evening so that the child falls asleep as soon as possible. From a psychological point of view, at this time he is in a special mental state of pre-sleep: the body gradually relaxes, his eyes close, his own thoughts are still absent at this age and do not interfere with attentive concentration on the voice of an adult. This concentration is also helped by the fact that the singing voice is the main one against the background of the surrounding silence and darkness. We can say that the state of the child is similar to what happens in people under hypnotic suggestion. The rhythm of a lullaby, usually correlated with the rhythms of the breath and heartbeat of mother and child, plays a very important role in opening the soul to the singing voice.

Internal attunement to another person through the rhythm of his movements is the most ancient, universal and most successful way of psychological attachment to a partner. Thus, two people are united into a single energy-information system, driven by a common rhythm. A child learns this tuning even in the womb, where the rhythmic processes in his body are synchronized with the rhythms of her life, and uses this ability for the rest of his life. Therefore, the intonation, words, images of the song freely penetrate into the animate body of the child, literally saturating it and fixing itself in the very depths of its being. The child does not have to understand, he just needs to let it in and remember. In a drowsy state in the dense depths of his soul, which even later, when he grows up, will never be fully accessible to his own consciousness, ancient, holistic, powerful and capacious images nest, which are clots of the most important life meanings transmitted in folk tradition. The spatial and symbolic schemes that organize these meanings in the folklore text reflect the folk model of the world order. In the future, they will become the basis for the formation of the child’s own symbolic thinking, without which there can be no understanding of the world and oneself, no understanding of the meaning of one’s existence.

An evening soothing song once accompanied a child during the first few years of his life. It is present in the life of many families today. As the child gets older, she is joined by storytelling and storytelling, heartfelt conversations about what is most important for bedtime. And sleep, as you know, is given to a person both for relaxation and for in-depth processing of the information that has accumulated during the day. Moreover, what is said before going to bed has a particularly significant impact on the state of the soul of the sleeping person and the content of his dreams. Therefore, it was far from accidental that educators introduced the child to texts that have ideological significance, revealing the principles of life arrangement, just before going to bed. After all, they had to enter deep into the soul and remain there for life. Then it is clear why, answering the question about the main person who determined the structure of their soul, many Russian writers named their nanny and her evening tales.

The intuitive desire of an adult who belongs to a traditional folk culture to give the child a conceptual and figurative system of supports for his worldview as early as possible psychologically exactly corresponds to the same desire on the part of the child himself.

Most of all, the child is afraid of the chaos of impressions falling upon him, the events of external and internal life, which he needs to somehow organize in order to understand them and cope with them. For this, the child urgently needs figurative-conceptual supports, to which he will tie the changing events of the current life, organizing them into some understandable whole.

Traditional folk culture provided the child with such supports in various forms, consistently and gradually creating an ideological foundation for the emerging personality. Thus, one of the most important human needs was satisfied — the need for meaning, i.e. in understanding the world around us and realizing our place and purpose in it.

It is well known in practical psychology and psychotherapy that early childhood is the time when the child’s basic relationship with the world is established. It is no coincidence that they say that the foundations of personality are laid before the age of five.

It is important for educators of young children to understand the content of the songs and speeches with which they address the child. Particular attention should be paid to texts in the content of which lies a worldview meaning.

Many adults believe that folklore texts are suitable for children because they are simple. In the minds of these adults, it is identified with native, simple and childish. But the essence is not in external simplicity. The psychological significance of these texts is associated with their peculiar magical power. Folklore images are unusually capacious, and verbal formulas are not without reason similar to a spell. They easily penetrate into the very depths of the soul, into its unconscious layers, because they speak their language. They talk about the most important thing for the orientation of this soul in earthly life, about what crystallized in maternal folklore from the vast spiritual experience of many generations of people who once also learned to live in the world.

As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, the desire to streamline your knowledge about the world, and then generalize it in the form of an intelligible fashion of the universe is also characteristic of children themselves. Every young child works intensively on this problem from the moment when he begins to master the languages ​​with which you can model the world, creating its symbolic counterpart in the form of a text — a verbal expression of a painted picture, a building, a sculpted figure, etc.

Between the ages of two and three, the child uses more than just verbal language, which he actively learns. In his buildings made of sand, in spatial structures made of cubes or other materials, his ideas about the world order are manifested. At two and a half — three years, the role of a modeling sign system in the world-building creativity of the child also begins to be played by the graphic language, i.e. children’s drawing. Unfortunately, parents and kindergarten teachers do not appreciate the drawings of young children who are just emerging from the stage of scribble drawing. Usually adults do not understand the psychic meaning of the enormous intellectual and spiritual work that a drawing child does between the ages of three and four. Although it is on the example of early childhood drawings that an adult can clearly see the sequence of phases in the construction of a child’s speculative picture of the world. Speculative — i.e. summarizing the understanding reached by one’s own mind of how the world works. The child embodies this understanding in his drawings and thus gives us the opportunity to at least partially see the results of the grandiose work that is invisibly taking place in his soul.

Let’s take a quick look at the main discoveries of the child, which fixes his drawing.

As you know, the first stage of children’s drawing is doodles, i.e. graphic marks left by a finger, pencil, felt-tip pen or other instrument on the surface of a sheet of paper, table, wall, etc. These are points, spots, lines of various shapes. The child begins to make the first chaotic scribbles at the age of about a year. Gradually, his hand-eye coordination improves, when his eyes get used to follow the graphic movements of the hand. The child with great pleasure streaks sheets of paper with “Karyaks-Maryaks”.

One of the most important psychological discoveries that a child makes between a year and two is that he can purposefully leave traces of his presence in this world visible to everyone. «Karyaki-Maryaki» obediently appear from under the tip of his pencil and remain on paper. They testify that the child has mastered the space of the sheet, marked himself, staked out his stay there, identified himself in these lines, dots, spots.

Between two and two and a half years, the child takes the next step: he discovers that the sheet of paper has edges. If earlier a hand with a pencil could easily go beyond the sheet, now the child begins to react to its edges (recall lullabies). Approaching them, the lines of doodles follow along the edges of the sheet, go around its corners, tend to return to the inside of the sheet. That is, the child already takes into account the boundaries of the situation in which his actions unfold.

Between two and a half and three years, a revolution takes place in children’s drawing. The child unexpectedly discovers that his “Karyaks-Maryaks” may look like something, may mean something. This is how the child discovers the symbolic function of drawing — the possibility of lines, spots, dots to denote something other than what they themselves are. They become elements of the graphic language, with the help of which the child begins to create the first images of people, animals, objects, and even abstract ideas. The imperfection of the graphic form does not interfere with the essence of the matter — now the child discovers the opportunity to speak in a pictorial language about everything that is important to him. An excellent example of how this happens is shown in Figure 1-1.

This is a drawing by a three-year-old boy, Shurik Ignatiev, published in the album “Children of the Siege Draw”. The drawing is typical and at the same time interesting because the little author, who has already discovered the symbolic function of drawing, uses the old scribble forms to solve a completely new, already symbolic task. A three-year-old starving blockade child is trying to convey his worldview, to tell about what he sees around him and what he dreams about. The drawing is called «This is a war, and in the middle is a bun.» There are two main characters here. They express two main ideas. The sprawling mass of squiggles denoting «War» is the terrible state of the world in which the child lives. And the lump inside this mass is “Bulka”, which the child dreams of. Such is the picture of the world of the blockade boy, striking in the brevity of the description: this is a terrible reality, in the center of which is his dream.

The first children’s images are randomly scattered on a sheet of paper — the child draws where there is free space, and therefore easily turns the sheet at an angle convenient for him. There is no up or down for him.

At this stage, it is important for the child that he can draw whoever he wants. It is like a magical act for him: «Stand before me like a leaf before grass.» Wanted — painted, called out of oblivion, forced to be.

The child enjoys the new ability to inhabit the space of a sheet of paper with any characters subject to him as his creator. And the intellectual task that the child solves is to highlight the necessary and sufficient features needed for the essential characterization of the character — so that a person differs from a dog, a dog from a mouse or a bird. (“A man walks standing, and a dog walks lying down. A man has two legs, but a dog has many, and a tail.”)

However, already between the ages of three and a half and four years, the child takes the next step: he begins to imagine the space of the sheet as the space of the World, which must be organized in a certain way in order to accommodate the characters there. Under their feet they must necessarily have the earth, and above their heads must be the sky.

The line of «earth» can be drawn with a brown or green line, but it can be «typed» from vertical lines — blades of grass, from flowers or mushrooms. It is important for a child that the idea of ​​the soil under his feet, the support on which everything rests, be realized in some form.

The «sky» line may be represented by a blue line or stripe, but may consist of a horizontal row of birds, planes, stars, suns, clouds — all these elements embody the idea of ​​u1.2bu1.3bthe sky, the top, which is like a roof over everything. (fig. XNUMX and XNUMX)

And between heaven and earth, characters are placed in a row. They stand in such a way that each one is in the fullness of his selfhood — entirely, to his full height and without blocking each other.

Such a composition is called tape, or frieze. The first to describe the frieze organization of drawings of preschool children was the Soviet art historian A. V. Bakushinsky in 1925. She interested him as an art historian with her similarity with the compositional principles of ancient Egyptian images.

For a psychologist, it is important that the frieze composition is the child’s first attempt to build a system of spatial coordinates that organizes the picture of the world he creates on a sheet of paper. In this world, the main structure-forming principle is the vertical — the division of the sheet into top, middle and bottom. This is the oldest principle in the history of mankind of the symbolic organization of space, which is embodied in various cultures in the image of the World Tree with its crown (top), trunk (middle) and roots (bottom). As we can see, this is also the earliest spatial scheme in the history of the development of an individual person (in ontogenesis), with the help of which the child tries to build a model of the inhabited world.

As the child grows older, the vertical coordinate in his drawing acquires more and more clearly the symbolic meaning of the axis of values. In the culture of adults, to which the child gradually joins, the theme of the sky, i.e. high, — is associated with the ideas of the Divine, spiritual, bright, developed, intellectual (high feelings, thoughts, aspirations, etc.).

The theme of the earth, i.e. low, — embodies the ideas of corporal, carnal, physiological, sexual, dense, dark, etc.

A little later than the vertical, the horizontal axis of the drawing begins to become significant for the child, which is increasingly associated with the idea of ​​the passage of time.

It should be noted that early childhood images of people are always facing the viewer. Profile drawings appear later. The child begins to use the image of a person in profile in order to convey the idea of ​​directional movement. As the child develops a desire to draw more and more complex plot moves in the relationships of the characters depicted, he increasingly uses the horizontal axis as a line showing the direction of the flow of time. This usually happens between four and five years of age.

Without going into further details of the development of children’s pictorial language, we only note that by the age of five, a normally developing child has basically already formed an individual symbolic system that allows him to use spatial and color codes to convey significant information using a picture.

The spatial proximity or distance of the characters from each other, the ratio of their sizes, the features of geometric shapes, the commonality of color and attributes, and other parameters of the picture carry a semantic load. They serve to express the spiritual closeness or alienation of the characters in the drawing, their significance or low value, reflect their characters and properties, which the small author wants to declare. Thus, between the ages of three and five, a child masters pictorial language as one of the most important sign systems, with the help of which he builds his version of the picture of the world.

But the drawings of a child are only one of many forms of displaying what his worldview is. There are many specific children’s ways of generalizing and systematizing ideas about the world around them. He does this in fantasies, games, dances, songs, modeling and other types of individual creative activities. Often, adults do not even notice how the child performs continuous world-building work, allowing him to maintain a sense of stability, correctness and meaningfulness of his being.

It happens that adults, without realizing it, try to destroy the results of this work of the child. For example, quite often teachers struggle with the «line of the earth» and the «line of the sky» in the drawings of preschoolers: they make sure that the child completely paints over the depicted sky and earth as a flat decoration, against which the characters of his drawing should be located. For an adult, this way of drawing seems “more normal and “more correct” than a child’s.

Here there is a clash of two completely different intellectual and worldview concepts that determine the construction of the picture. One is for children, the other is for adults.

In his drawing, the child tries to reflect the construction of the world, in particular, the need to clearly distinguish between the idea of ​​the top and the idea of ​​the bottom, in relation to which a person must orient his position. (Here it is appropriate to recall the aphoristic expression of adults about how one should live in the world, where the same spatial concept is present: one must live in such a way that one’s feet stand firmly on the ground, and one’s head is in the sky.)

The child’s tendency to convey in a drawing not specific visual impressions, but the cumulative result of personal knowledge of the world is a characteristic feature of preschool children’s drawing. They use pictorial language as a sign system, with which you can model the world on a sheet of paper, highlighting significant objects and fixing the relationship between them. Therefore, drawing at preschool age is one of the most effective ways to streamline the system of children’s ideas about the world.

The vast majority of adults do not understand that the child builds his drawing as an intellectual model of the world, and not its visible analogue. For them, the external similarity of the pattern to what our eyes see is important. Adults do not like that the child draws the «idea» of the sky, the «idea» of the earth with the help of a conditional line or strip, not in the way they are seen in nature or are usually depicted in the drawings of adults. Therefore, teachers and parents demand from a small child the creation of a “correct”, from their point of view, image that also meets the adult criteria of “beautiful”.

Thus, adults push the child to draw in accordance with the principles of image construction inherent in the culture of adults, although these principles remain alien to the child’s mental organization for a long time and are internally incomprehensible to him. In this way, adults noticeably impoverish children’s drawing, depriving it of its highest, «world-ordering» function, and children’s creativity of inner independence.

After the age of five, the individual child’s personal efforts in trying to model the world are usually complemented by the opportunities that the children’s subculture brings. In the future, we will repeatedly talk about how and why children join forces in order to streamline their relations with the multidimensional, complex, contradictory, incomprehensible, scary and at the same time attractive world around, how they build the space of the children’s «cosmos» inside the world of adults ” that suits their logic and their needs.

Such cultural-psychic construction can be in cooperation and in conflict with the adult world. Usually, children highly appreciate the ideological help of adults and often achieve it using various methods — from direct questions to subtle diplomatic traps. If they do not find a response to their requests, then they manage on their own. Even a small age in this is not a hindrance.