Imagine sitting down with your toddler and making a silent pact before a single crayon is touched: the goal is the ugliest drawing possible.
You go first. You draw a sun with twelve uneven arms and a face that looks deeply unsettled. You give it a name. Your toddler looks at the drawing, then at you, then at the drawing again. Something behind their eyes shifts. Then they pick up a crayon and add to it: a cloud with teeth, a house made of triangles, a purple fish where a bird might go. You announce it is the finest cloud-tooth-house you have ever seen. They collapse.
That hour has a different texture than almost any other kind of time you can spend together. And the difference has a name.
Why children connect differently than adults
When most adults want to feel close to someone, we reach for conversation. We ask questions, share things, listen. It is a reasonable instinct between adults, and it mostly works.
But for small children, it is the wrong door entirely. As psychologist Lawrence Cohen, author of Playful Parenting, explained: “For children, conversation is not at the center of how they connect and form a bridge with someone else. There’s basic primal affection and love — and there’s play.”
Play is not how children pass the time while waiting to grow up. It is how they communicate, how they feel close to someone, how they express what they do not yet have words for. When a parent enters that world completely, not as a supervisor or patient facilitator but as an actual participant with no agenda, a child feels that. When that parent also lets themselves be bad at something inside that world, something shifts even further.
That second part is the bit most of us never think to try.
What actually happens when a parent acts incompetent
There is a specific dynamic that changes when a parent is visibly, enthusiastically bad at something in front of a small child. Cohen writes about it in Playful Parenting: “To act incompetent helps them feel more powerful.”
This sounds simple, but the effect runs deeper than it first appears. When a parent drops their competence, the usual power balance briefly equalizes. For once, the child is the more capable person in the room. They drew the better sun. Their ideas are the good ones. Their judgment about whether your lopsided cat looks right is the judgment that matters.
That shift does something specific to the connection between you. It communicates, without words, that you are not here to guide them right now. You are here to play with them as an equal. Small children feel that difference, even if they would never be able to describe it. And they respond to it. The giggling that follows a parent’s deliberately terrible drawing is not just amusement at the drawing. It is relief, and closeness, and the pleasure of suddenly being the competent one.
Why ugly works better than good for this particular goal
When you try to make something beautiful with a child, some part of your attention is on the outcome. Even if you do not mean for this to happen, you are aiming at a standard, and the child can feel your attention split between them and the thing you are making.
When you try to make something ugly on purpose, the outcome disappears entirely. There is no standard to reach, nothing to get right. The product is a joke by design, so all that remains is the shared experience of making it. You are no longer producing something together. You are just playing together, and the paper and crayons happen to be the medium.
I spend a lot of my days optimizing things. I think carefully about how I use my time, and I like doing that. But small children do not live that way, and when I bring that mindset into play with Emilia it creates distance rather than closeness. The deliberate ugly project removes the optimization entirely. The bar is the floor. What fills the space instead is whatever is actually happening between the two of you.
The strange value of the terrible object you made
Making something together gives you an artifact. A thing you can point to afterward. And with the ugly-on-purpose project, that artifact carries something that careful, well-made things often do not.
A tidy handprint craft captures a moment. A deliberately terrible drawing of a sun with seventeen arms and a confused face captures something harder to hold: the fact that you were both being ridiculous at the same time. That nobody was performing or instructing. That the whole hour existed outside of any goal except to be in it together.
In a few years Emilia will be old enough to keep things. She will probably keep a drawing or two. I want some of those to be ones where the lines are all wrong and the colors make no sense and the whole thing looks like we were having the best time making it. Because that is what it will mean.
What you are actually practicing when you do this
Deliberately making something ugly with a small child is, for most adults, harder than it sounds. There is a strong and mostly unconscious pull toward doing things properly. Toward drawing the arms at even intervals. Toward offering a gentle pointer when the child’s fish ends up sideways. Most of us have to actively override that impulse.
The practice is committing to the worst sun you have ever drawn and defending it seriously. Building the structure that is clearly going to fall. Adding the color that makes no sense because it will get a laugh. Staying in the game rather than quietly improving things.
This week I am planning to sit down with Emilia, a blank piece of paper, and a box of crayons. My only goal is to produce the most confidently bad drawing I have ever made. She can be the judge of whether I succeeded.
