It began because we needed something to do with the pre-dinner window — that gap between when my son got home from school and when food was ready, which historically had been filled with screen time, low-level whining, and one memorable incident involving a marker and the side of the washing machine.
The rule was simple: five minutes of drawing. Not a lesson, not a project, not anything that required explaining or judging or even looking at when we were done. Just paper and whatever drawing implements were within reach, and five minutes of sitting together at the kitchen table and drawing while dinner cooked.
That was eighteen months ago. We still do it, almost every weekday.
What Five Minutes Actually Contains
The first thing we noticed was that five minutes is, paradoxically, enough. Children don't need long to draw something meaningful — they need to be settled and present, which five minutes of structured quiet achieves before the pen has hit the paper more than twice.
What happens in those five minutes is small and ordinary and — I've come to think — enormously important. My son draws without pressure. I draw, badly, which he finds hilarious and which has completely demystified the act of drawing for him. He doesn't think of me as someone who judges art now; he thinks of me as someone who draws dogs that look like clouds and claims they're intentional.
We talk. Not always, and not in any planned way, but the side-by-side drawing position has a quality of ease to it that face-to-face conversation sometimes doesn't. Children — and adults — often find it easier to say things when they're looking at the same thing rather than at each other. Things come out in the drawing window that I don't think would come out at the dinner table.
The Unexpected Dividend
About four months in, I realised that my son's drawings had become a kind of journal. Without any prompting, he was drawing things that had happened to him — a difficult moment at school, a birthday party, a time the dog did something funny. The drawings were his way of processing the day, of selecting the moments that had weight and giving them form.
I started keeping some of them. Then I started photographing them with a short note about what he said when he showed it to me. What began as a no-stakes screen-time alternative had become, entirely accidentally, one of the richest records of his inner life I could imagine having.
This is what rituals do. They create the conditions for something to happen, without demanding that it does. The drawing is the ritual. Whatever emerges in the drawing window is the gift.
On the Connection Part
The word "connection" gets used a lot in parenting spaces, sometimes until it loses its meaning. What I mean when I use it here is something specific and small: knowing what's in your child's head today. Not in a clinical, where-are-you-developmentally sense, but in the daily sense — what they thought about on the walk home, what made them laugh at lunch, what worry they're quietly carrying.
Sitting next to a child while they draw creates the conditions for that kind of knowing. It's low-pressure. It's side by side. It doesn't require eye contact or emotional readiness or an invitation to talk. It just requires being there, in the same physical space, also making something, also being present.
The connection that grows from that is quiet and gradual and, a year in, completely solid.
The Logistics, Such as They Are
We use whatever is available: markers, coloured pencils, sometimes a single biro. The paper is just printer paper. We don't have a special art corner or a particular time — five minutes before dinner at the kitchen table, that's all.
There are no rules about what to draw. No feedback on quality. No preservation requirement — most drawings go in the recycling, with a few photographed or kept. The ritual is the practice, not the output.
If you want to make some of the drawings last beyond the table, pairing them with a voice recording of your child explaining what they made takes about ninety seconds and produces something worth keeping. But that's optional, and the ritual is valuable without it.
Starting Tomorrow
If the only change you made this week was to sit down with your child for five minutes and draw, badly, alongside them — no agenda, no instruction, just parallel making — you would have done something quietly significant.
The five-minute part isn't the point. The showing up, side by side, part is the point. The rest takes care of itself.
Every child is different. Trust your instincts — you know your child best.
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