Every Kid Draws the Same Sun

My daughters love to draw family pictures. These pictures are usually two large stick figures, two smaller stick figures, and a yellow circle in the corner with lines shooting out of it. The sun.

I drew that exact same sun when I was their age, and you probably did too. That yellow circle with the lined rays is practically universal.

Which got me thinking: why do all kids draw the same sun?

I'd been reading Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and found a whole chapter on children's drawing stages that basically answered the question.

Scribbles Come First

Before the sun, before the stick figures, before anything recognizable at all, kids scribble. The most natural scribbling movement is a circle.^[1] Not a square, not a line across the page. A circle. Babies and toddlers just naturally move their arms in circular motions, and the marks follow.

Edward Hill described it well: there's something almost magical about a child moving a crayon across a surface and watching a line appear in their path.^[2] They're not trying to draw anything. They're just discovering that they can make a mark on the world, and that's a big deal when you're two.

If you've ever watched a toddler with a crayon, you've seen this. The way they press so hard the crayon breaks. The fact that they'll cover an entire page and then flip it over and start again. It's not random. It's their first experiment with cause and effect.

Then Symbols Show Up

Somewhere around age 3, something clicks. That circular scribbling motion becomes a circle on purpose. And then the circle gets two dots for eyes, a line for a mouth, and a couple of lines sticking out for arms and legs. The first person.

Here's what's fun about this stage: that same basic shape (circle with lines sticking out) can be a person, a cat, the sun, a jellyfish, an elephant, or a flower. Kids have cracked the code on a universal symbol, and they use it for everything. It's honestly pretty efficient.

By 3 or 4, the details start filling in. My kids started adding buttons on shirts, fingers on hands, zippers on jackets. They were noticing the world more closely and putting what they saw into their drawings. They did this not because anyone told them to add buttons, but because they looked down one day and noticed buttons were there.

Drawing Becomes Storytelling

Around age 4 or 5, something else shifts. Kids stop just drawing things and start drawing stories. A picture isn't just a picture anymore. It's a scene with characters and a plot. "This is me and you at the park and the dog is chasing the bird and the bird is going to the clouds."

This is also when that classic landscape appears: a strip of green at the bottom for ground, a blue sky, a house, a tree, that familiar sun in the corner. If you saved any of your childhood drawings, you probably have a dozen versions of this exact scene.

What's happening here is bigger than drawing. Kids are working out how the world is organized: where the ground ends, where the sky starts, what goes where. Drawing is how they test their understanding and make sense of things that are hard to put into words.

Then Around Age 10, Most Kids Stop

This is the part that surprised me. Research shows that around age 9 or 10, there's a steep drop-off in drawing.^[1] It's not because kids lose interest in art, but because they start caring about realism. They look at their drawings and think, "That doesn't look right." And since nobody taught them the specific skills to close that gap, they quit.

Think about your own experience. Somewhere around 4th or 5th grade, you probably decided you "couldn't draw." Most adults say exactly that. But the truth is, you just hit a wall that nobody helped you climb over.

That gap between "I want it to look real" and "I don't know how to make it look real" is where most people's drawing lives end. It doesn't happen at 2 when they're scribbling, or at 5 when they're drawing suns. It happens at 10, when they start judging their own work by adult standards.

Why This Matters for Us Right Now

If you have a kid between 2 and 8, you're in the middle of these stages right now. And the most useful thing I've taken from reading about this is: don't rush it. Every stage is doing something important.

When your 2-year-old scribbles all over the page, they're learning that their actions create results. When your 4-year-old draws you with seven fingers and no neck, they're processing what they know about people. When your 6-year-old draws the same house-tree-sun scene for the hundredth time, they're building a mental model of how the world works.

Kids also get more out of drawing when a parent is nearby, paying attention, engaged in the process with them.^[3] You don't have to direct or correct anything. Just ask "tell me about your drawing" instead of "what is that?"

It's the same idea behind Scribble Scrabble. Just a blank canvas and colors. The app doesn't care what stage your kid is in.

The Sun Will Come

Every child draws the same sun because every child goes through the same stages: the circle, the face, the stick figure, the landscape, the sun in the corner. It's one of those quiet, universal things about being a kid.

So the next time your child hands you a drawing covered in wild, unreadable scribbles, or shows you a picture where everyone's arms come out of their heads, know that they're right on track. They're doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing.

And eventually, that sun will show up in the corner. You'll recognize it immediately.