Art My Heart

How did Art Therapy get started?

How can we help children (and adults) better understand and express their emotions?
One powerful way is through art! Art therapy has been used for many decades to support mental and emotional health. It officially became recognized as a form of therapy in the early 1900s—and even today, many health insurance plans cover it.

Several well-known therapists helped shape the field of art therapy:

• Paul-Max Simon believed that creating art helped people express deep emotions and understand their own thoughts better. He studied how symbols and images in art could reveal a person’s hidden feelings.
• Carl Jung, a famous psychologist, was one of the first to explore how art could support emotional healing. He encouraged people to draw or paint their dreams and inner thoughts.
• Viktor Frankl created logotherapy, a type of therapy that focused on finding meaning in life—even during difficult times. His work has influenced many creative therapy approaches.
• Adrian Hill helped start the first hospital-based art therapy program in the UK and was the one who actually coined the term “art therapy.”

These early pioneers believed that art could help people not just feel better, but better understand why they feel the way they do.
We’ll explore more about each of them in future posts!

As parents of young children, we play a key role in helping them understand and manage their emotions from an early age. When we teach emotional awareness while they’re young, we give them tools they can carry into adulthood—tools that help them handle stress, communicate clearly, and build healthy relationships. And isn’t that what we all want for our kids?

In the next post, we’ll dive into the many benefits of art therapy and how you, as a parent, can begin to weave creative emotional support into your child’s everyday life.

Reflection Question

“What tools do you wish you had learned as a child to help manage your emotions—and how can you offer those to your child now?”

I’ll be answering this question—and many others like it—in future posts, so be sure to follow along! I’ll also be sharing simple art projects and fun activities you can do with your children to help them connect with their emotions in a meaningful way.

✨ No pressure—just easy ideas you can try when the moment’s right. Save this post for later or share it with a parent who could use a gentle way to connect with their child.