What to do with all the kids’ drawings

You can’t keep every drawing, and throwing them away feels terrible. A simple way to keep the art, lose the pile, and not feel guilty.

A child in nursery can bring home five drawings a day. By the end of a year that is a box. By school age it is several, and you know you can’t keep them, and you can’t bring yourself to bin them.

You don’t have to choose between the pile and the guilt.

Keep the picture, not the paper

What you want in twenty years is to see what they drew at four. A good scan gives you that. The sugar paper, the glitter that sheds, and the macaroni do not need to survive.

Scan it properly

• Use a document scanner on your phone, not the camera. It finds the edges and flattens the page.
• Scan in daylight, on a plain surface, with no shadow of your hand.
• Do it the day it comes home. A weekly backlog becomes a monthly one and then a box again.

Save what the paper doesn’t say

The drawing alone loses half its meaning. Write down who made it, the date, and, most important, what they told you it was. “A dog” is a scribble. “A dog who is sad because his sandwich is gone” is a memory.

Keep a few originals

Choose maybe ten a year: the first face with legs coming out of it, the family portrait where you have no neck, the one they were proudest of. A flat folder per year is enough.

Let them see you value it

Kids notice what happens to their work. Scanning a drawing together, and showing them it is kept with their name on it, tells them more than a fridge door does. Then, with a clear conscience, recycle the rest after they’re in bed.

Put them next to what they said

A drawing from the month they were obsessed with volcanoes belongs with the things they said about volcanoes. Kept together, in order, they stop being clutter and become the story of a year.