All this suggests that kids’ shapes and figures aren’t all that simplistic after all—what’s dismissed as simplicity may instead be a degree of mental freedom that many abstract artists long to recreate. Children might be more open to playing with representation of invisible things like sound and emotion, Concordia’s Pariser has argued, because they aren’t yet limited by the constraint of depicting only visible subjects that’s characteristic of traditional Western art.

Of course, young children’s artistic absurdities often come down to the fact that they are kids, that their technical abilities aren’t well-advanced. Many scholars warn against overestimating kids’ artistic sophistication; any similarities to the work of brilliant abstract artists are just lucky accidents, they say.

Lucky accident or artistic prodigy, acknowledging that young kids aren’t as intent on producing a realistic rendering helps demonstrate what the drawing experience means to them. For many kids, drawing is exhilarating not because of the final product it leads to, but because they can live completely in the world of their drawing for a few minutes (and then promptly forget about it a few minutes later). Adults may find it hard to relate to this sort of full-body, fleeting experience. But the opportunities for self-expression that drawing provide have important, even therapeutic, value for kids.

Even simple scribbles are meaningful. While it was once thought that kids only scribbled to experience the physical sensation of moving their arm along the page, “now it’s been shown that when children are scribbling … they’re representing through action, not through pictures,” said Boston College’s Winner. “For example, a child might draw a truck by making a line fast across the page and going ‘zoom, zoom,’ and so it doesn’t look like a truck when the child is done, but if you watch the process, what the child says and the noises and motion he makes when he’s drawing, you can see that he is trying to represent a truck through action,” she said. “And in a way you have drawing fused with symbolic play.”

Liane Alves, a prekindergarten teacher at Inspired Teaching Demonstration Public Charter School in D.C., told me about a student who presented her with a drawing featuring a single straight line across the page. Alves assumed the child hadn’t given too much thought to the drawing until he proceeded to explain that the line was one of the mattresses from The Princess and the Pea, one of the fairy tales they read in class. The student, however, may have offered a different explanation at another point in time. Maureen Ingram, who’s a preschool teacher at the same school, said her students often tell different stories about a given piece of art depending on the day, perhaps because they weren’t sure what they intended to draw when they started the picture. “We as adults will often say, ‘I’m going to draw a horse,’ and we set out ... and get frustrated when we can’t do it,” Ingram said. “They seem to take a much more sane approach, where they just draw, and then they realize, ‘it is a horse.’”

Ultimately, what may be most revealing about kids’ art isn’t the art itself but what they say during the drawing process. They’re often telling stories that offer a much clearer window into their world than does the final product. Asking them what their drawing is “supposed to be” wouldn’t yield as many answers, either; some have even argued that kids might be naming their work because they’re used to the ritual of their teachers asking them to describe their drawing and then writing a short title on the piece of paper. Studies suggest that kids will create an elaborate narrative while drawing, but when telling adults about their work they’ll simply name the items or characters in the image.