Why do you think children color on walls?

Because it’s a HUGE canvas, and it is so everybody can see it! And small kids can’t foresee the damage and work for others, for them it is something to be proud of!

We only had one incident with the walls, and it was recently. My 4-year-old decided that his heavy work of art needed to be displayed, and the normal scotch tape was not holding it up. He decided to glue it to the wall. Our walls are all covered with their art, and it’s an honest mistake. In fact, it’s really only a “mistake” at all because his parents have the wrong idea about what walls should look like. I was not mad, but he now understands that there is no more glue on the walls.

In an ideal world, walls would be just blank canvases awaiting the entire family’s artistic expression.

Why not? It’s blank. It needs decoration.

Children don’t have a sense of long term consequences. They don’t know the damage is very difficult to deal with. They don’t even know it’s damage. They have to learn, and the only way to learn is to do something and have someone smack you if they don’t like it. But I wouldn’t recommend smacking. I’d suggest a small conversation, preferably before any wall writing has occurred.

Because they are devious little schemers and they do that to probe the boundaries of how far they can go to torment adults before they snap.

They ink; therefore they are.

Because they’ve been taught to write and draw, and the wall is completely blank.

One of our best family memories is when I taught my then four year old how to spell her name. Cory. She didn’t know how to read. She didn’t know how to write. All she knew were that these symbols meant something special to her.

One day I walk in the living room and there is the word “Cory,” in big letters, on the wall. I hollered, “Cory!!”
She comes scampering in, with her big ole’ brown eyes all huge and round and said, “What Momma??”
I said, “We don’t write on walls! We write on paper!”
She looks at her handywork, then looks at me and said, “How did chu know it was me?”
Valid question, since I had a daycare, watching 8 other kids.

It was one of those melt-down moments that comes to a parent. Gotta keep a straight face!

No, they aren’t trying to piss you off. Just tell them that is what paper is for.

I think they perceive its immediate possibilities—here is a crayon, there is a wall—and don’t think beyond that. Unless they draw or write something hateful, I truly don’t believe they have any destructive intent. Sure, they have to learn not to do it, but if they’re very young I don’t think they’re knowingly committing acts of malfeasance. Kids tend to be thoughtless in analogous ways right on into their teens.

As a toddler my son used to draw on himself with markers as well as on the wall. For a while it was a bit suspenseful to undress him because I didn’t know what color his feet would be.

When I was young, my parents deliberately left the walls of my room blank so I could color or paint or whatever on them. I was into the civil war at the time, and I drew all these pictures of civil war soldiers on the walls. They weren’t very good, but my parents kept them for many years, and then they had the house painted. According to them, they told the painters not to paint over the drawings, but alas, the painters did.

Gotta love those crayons. My daughter pooped purple one day. I’ll never forget THAT diaper!

It’s stories like that ^^ that make me feel better about not being a parent.

@burntbonez Pssht, that’s nothing. My daughter once pooped a Barbie shoe. Parenting is not for the… squeamish. LOL

‘coz theys likkle and they can :P

Because they are there. And they are big blank canvases.

Be glad they didn’t draw WITH poop. My daughter was a regular pajama escaping Houdini and Poopy Picasso when she was little.

Because they’re there, just recently I noticed an umbrella etched onto my daughter’s bedroom wall, when I asked her why a brolly, she replied why not?
Ask a silly question…

I have a memory of when I was two years old. I was in my room leaning out the window and yelling at kids who where using my swing set. Many years later I told my mom this memory and she remembered it too. I was in my room being punished for drawing on the wall. She told me she could understand my doing that. She was an artist and all that blank wall was meant to be drwn upon. (I don’t remember that!)

Because they can… Don’t you remember doing completely stupid shit without even thinking, just because you were able to?
Their brains are not developed enough for them to perceive consequences, or have theory of mind (I am a being with a mind; there are other beings out there with minds that do not perceive things exactly as I do).

They have a crayon, there’s a wall, what could make more sense? They don’t understand what the wall costs, and what the results will be and they’re curious. it’s why adults raise kids and not the other way around.

Friends of ours with two small children have a wall for them to draw on. As a result almost all of it is on that wall.

When I was younger about six or seven I liked to put my name on everything that was mine. My headboard, my books, my T-shirts, everything except the walls and floor. I wanted everyone that saw my name to remember me.
I think kids write on walls because they feel an urge to. Coloring is something they like to do, so they do it everywhere they think they can. Consequences be darned. It’s as if they think “I like coloring, and there’s something I can color on.” That’s all it takes.

Ownership and expression. Also we run of paper and paper gets lost and crumpled and thrown away.

My nice son has a little kid who was given chalk and a shown a wall that had chalkboard paint on it when he was about 11 months old. It was so great – his little body was just developed enough for him to do BIG gestures, he could just sit and then stand there and make huge marks… his body didn’t have fine motor control, it had athletic huge swoopy impulses. They didn’t give him anything to mark with except chalk, which wiped off. He just worked on this one wall. The other walls didn’t “take” the chalk so he stayed with that one. Now he’s almost four, and he prefers paper, and he completely understands the difference.

p.s. it was in the kitchen. Kitchens get cleaned up a lot. It was all so easy….

I have a measuring wall, just inside the back door. For 26 years just about every person who has walked into this house gets measured. Family gets measured on a regular basis. A few years ago my then-six-year-old granddaughter decided to take a sparkly marker and drawwww a snaky, sparkly line allll through the markings.
I started to say “What are you…..!!!!” Then my “developed” brain kicked in and I shut up. I couldn’t very well say, “We don’t draw on walls!” Duh. So I explained what the wall was, and what it was specifically for, and she didn’t do it again. No harm, no fowl foul. (Coloma’s on my mind) (I’m looking around now, trying to decide which wall would make a good drawing wall….)

Why not put up a big sheet of paper on the wall and encourage them to express themselves on that? Their creativity should be encouraged but properly directed where no lasting harm will result.

Forget the paper. I have a short hallway between the kitchen and the dining room. It would be perfect!