In drawing, as in spoken language, children's “reception strategies” or understanding of graphics outrun their productive capacities by a substantial margin. Although one might hesitate to characterize children's drawings on the whole as deficient or impoverished, it is reasonable to ask why they do not move more rapidly toward a diverse interpretation of reality in line with their growing sophistication in perceiving and understanding the world.

The possible role of stereotypes

One possible explanation is that graphic inventiveness is restricted by the ubiquity of those public stereotypes that children spontaneously adopt or have forced upon them. Certainly stereotypes and other influences from external models are found in children's drawings, but they are not as pervasive as casual inspection might suggest. Even when children are in close and continuous contact with one another's drawings, there is considerable variety in their representation of even the most common objects. The drawings in Fig. 8.1 are the products of a single class of Australian public school children aged 5.6 to 7 years, drawn on the same day. The variety of forms is striking, and this is typical of much of their drawing. Even when such children do adopt stereotyped formulas, they not infrequently include their own personal versions side by side with the “public” versions, indicating that when stereotypes have been incorporated into a child's repertoire, they do not necessarily monopolize production.