Between childhood and adolescence – a seeing gaze onto children’s drawings

Abstract

This article sees children’s drawings as a medium to understand the time of transition from childhood to adolescence. The documentary method and its application to children’s drawings provide the means to actually see and explicate what the drawings show. The example of a drawing (TV in the desert) outlines the documentary process steps to reconstruct the document’s inherent meaning. In the present case it is the creator’s inner engagement with age-specific developmental tasks: the challenges of a maturing body, societal expectations and the unfolding of a consistent (gender-) identity during the transition from childhood to adolescence.