11 Impressive Benefits of Mindful Coloring Pages for Kids and Adults
Most children enjoy getting creative with pencils and crayons. But did you know there are impressive reasons beyond fun to encourage the use of mindful coloring pages for kids and adults?
The significant benefits of mindful coloring pages are now being realized for all age groups as it takes its place alongside yoga and meditation as an enjoyable way to improve physical and mental wellbeing.
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As I highlight the vast reasons to use coloring pages for kids, I hope that teachers and parents are inspired to adopt them as a mindfulness tool to help children to calm down and refocus.
The added bonus of mindful coloring is that it promotes creativity and improves fine motor skills, and it's not just for primary and elementary school students - high schools and universities use it too!
Benefits of Mindful Coloring for Kids
I am a huge advocate for coloring pages for kids. Parents may see them as a quick activity without much educational value, but teachers use them because of the great benefits of coloring for students.
Mindful coloring can be a highly effective way of fostering physical and psychological wellness in children. While it's a relaxing form of self-expression that stimulates creativity, it also promotes a range of benefits to nurture wellbeing by reducing stress, anger and anxiety. As for the physical benefits, consider the following:
► Wildly Popular Kindness Coloring Pages!
Our study confirmed evidence for the benefits of colouring on mood that has been found in earlier studies, but the findings on mindfulness, creativity and visual attention are new and exciting.
• Enhances fine motor development
Using mindful coloring pages for kids helps build the muscles in their fingers, hand, and wrist to aid in manipulating small objects.
Very young children start by grabbing a crayon in their fist and putting it to paper. As their fine motor skills develop, they start to grip it with their fingers and eventually learn to manipulate their crayon beyond a random scribble. These are the first steps toward being able to draw or write with a pencil or pen, an essential skill required for future learning.
Click here to read why it's so important to develop fine motor skills.
When combined with increasing hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills also open new doors to exploration, learning, and creative expression.
In order to learn to write or draw, for example, a child's hand must be strong and coordinated enough to hold a pencil steady for a long period of time.
• Improves hand-eye coordination
According to Access Therapy Services, "hand-eye coordination refers to our ability to process information received from the eyes to guide and direct the hands to perform a task."
They place great importance on hand-eye coordination stating that "if children don’t develop their coordination skills, they might:
- Avoid physical activities
- Be slower than their peers when it comes to mastering physical skills
- Become clumsy
- Have difficulty learning academically
- Have trouble developing their social skills
Their recommendation for developing these skills includes coloring and painting.
New research findings show that young children with better eye-to-hand coordination scored higher on basic academic skills compared to their less-dexterous peers. The results, published in Psychological Science, signal an important relationship between children’s ability to physically interact with their environment and their cognitive development.
• Develops spatial awareness
Visual perception is an important skill to develop in young children. Coloring can help strengthen awareness of the hand's position and margins on the page to help children keep their pencil within a given area.
► Join this Exciting Kindness Challenge!
This is such an easy but fun kindness challenge! Teachers tell me over and over how much their students love it and how they beg to do it again.
Students color bookmarks with positive suggestions or kindness quotes that encourage good behavior. They get so excited when it's time to sneak off to the library on this engaging kindness mission where they hide their gifts for others to find.
• Builds concentration and focus
When children are asked to color between the lines, they may need to concentrate more than they would with freeform drawing. Because they are contained to a specific area, they will need to stay focused on the space they have to fill and be more precise in their application.
• Promotes creativity and self-expression
Coloring allows children to express their individuality through color selection and medium. It's interesting to observe how much pressure they apply, the color choices they make, and whether they color loosely or tightly. Everyone is different and so is each masterpiece.
One study also showed that using mindful coloring for kids can increase the novelty and variety displayed in the pictures they create.
Sixty-four children in kindergarten and first grade were asked to color one of three pictures which varied in complexity...
The findings suggest that giving children models to color can increase the novelty displayed in their subsequent productions, and that giving children complex models to color can increase the variety displayed in the pictures that they make.
• Teaches color and shape recognition
Filling in the spaces with color on a printed page helps children to recognize hue, perspective, shape and form as well as giving them an opportunity to explore different color combinations.
• Relaxing brain breaks
Mindful coloring can have a profoundly therapeutic and calming effect on children as they shift their focus to concentrate on creating a lovely piece of art. This peaceful activity can provide an outlet for processing emotions and take the focus off challenging situations. It's perfect when students need a brain break to reset after an intensive session of learning.
Coloring enthusiasts claim that coloring makes them feel calmer, mentally clearer, happier, and more relaxed.
When engaged in their hobby, “colorists,” as they call themselves, say that their worries temporarily fade away.
This is not surprising when you consider that all arts and crafts hobbies have the power to focus the mind similarly to meditation.
Even renowned psychologist Carl Jung knew the benefits as he had his patients coloring mandalas for relaxation and self-discovery.
► FREE Kindness Coloring Pages!
Benefits of Mindful Coloring for Adults
One of the things that convinced me about the benefits of coloring for adults is an article I read by an art therapist and psychotherapist who saw first-hand the changes in her clients when she put coloring books in her waiting room. She echoes many who believe in the power of coloring.
The following are some of the benefits I feel are most noteworthy to mention:
• Modern self-help tool
When testing to measure improvements in psychological outcomes, a study concluded that coloring helped lower depression and anxiety, calling it a highly accessible self-help tool.
In 2 experiments, undergraduates colored and participated in a control condition. Subjective and performance measures of mood and mindfulness were included: an implicit mood test (Experiment 1) and a selective attention task (Experiment 2) along with a divergent thinking test.
In both experiments, coloring significantly reduced anxiety and increased mindfulness compared with control and baseline scores. Following coloring, participants scored significantly lower on implicit fear than the control condition, and significantly higher on selective attention and original ideation. Coloring might not only reduce anxiety, but also improve mindful attention and creative cognition.
• Coloring helps maintain focus
Colouring is becoming accepted within a University setting as a tool for students to maintain focus. Theresa Citerella, a student studying art therapy at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. said that “A lot of my fellow graduate classmates bring these coloring books into the classroom setting as a tool to focus more on lectures.” She explained that more professors are beginning to welcome this behavior.
For my internship, I find the clients who are fidgeting and cannot sit still ask for coloring in books in order to concentrate on group discussions.
• Coloring can help you sleep
It's well documented that using light-emitting electronic devices prior to going to bed delays the circadian clock and suppresses levels of melatonin (a sleep-promoting hormone) which results in more time required before falling asleep. Most of us are guilty of using such devices in the evening so if sleeping is an issue, replacing devices with coloring books can be beneficial.
• An alternative to yoga or meditation
A psychologist in Melbourne, Australia is an avid fan of coloring for helping his clients relax and unwind.
Dr. Stan Rodski shared that he was having trouble getting his clients to use traditional techniques such as breathing, yoga and meditation to help control anxiety. When he saw how quickly and easily coloring relaxed children, he decided to research it as an alternative for adults and found it helped them achieve the same deep sense of relaxation.
Five minutes of colouring a day is enough to get the same effect on the brain as about an hour worth of conventional meditation.
DR. RODSKI, Colourtation Brain Science
"If you look at it from the brain perspective, when they started colouring their brain recognised it as a happy place and it helped them to feel quite youthful again," Dr. Rodski said.
"It’s a carefree happiness because with that childhood memory comes a sense of no responsibility, accountability or pressure, and the brain reacts to that."
He's so convinced of the little known power of coloring that he even created his own range of coloring meditation books.
How Does Coloring Help People Relax?
When people are stressed or anxious, they can find it difficult to stay focused in the present moment. That essentially means that their thoughts are centered around their worries or to-do list instead of what's happening right in front of them at the given time.
Teachers from the UK were randomly assigned to a colouring mindfulness-based intervention or waitlist group. Participants completed four scales (burnout, wellbeing, resilience and mindfulness) and participated in a 5-day intervention of daily mindfulness colouring or continued their working week as usual. Results of repeated-measures ANOVA showed statistically significant lower levels of burnout, stress, depressive symptoms and anxiety in the mindfulness colouring condition, as well as increased levels of resilience and mindfulness.
The act of coloring is likened to meditation or mindfulness in that it gives people something else to focus their attention on. When the brain is focused on a simple activity that takes us outside of ourselves and with a predictable outcome, it's able to relax.
► Your Students Will LOVE this Kindness Quilt Kit
An absolute favorite is this collaborative kindness quilt bulletin board kit. It's a best seller because students feel proud to have their coloring displayed in such a positive way.
Kindness quilt submitted by Karen Caswell, fourth grade teacher at Coomera Rivers State School
This patchwork quilt has 30 squares with kindness quotes as well as images and bordered squares for students to make their own patches.
Ready-made quilt squares can be printed to use as coloring pages or students can add their own positive messages in Google Slides™. Kids practice writing and spelling as they write or type an inspirational quote onto a blank template and personalize their piece with a picture.
This is a best seller because it's easy for teachers and students love to see their artwork included in a beautiful communal display.
Dr. Joel Pearson, a brain scientist at the University of New South Wales in Australia explains: "You have to look at the shape and size, you have to look at the edges, and you have to pick a colour. It should occupy the same parts of the brain that stops any anxiety-related mental imagery happening as well. Anything that helps you control your attention is going to help.”
It's amazing that something so simple and enjoyable can have so many unknown benefits for users of all ages.
I invite you to give mindful coloring a try with your children at home or in the classroom. Grab these free coloring pages for kids or if you'd like a calming activity for yourself, I have one for you too!
Share your experiences
I'd love to see your results and hear how coloring benefits you and your children so please feel free to share your experiences and photos of your masterpieces!
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AUTHOR: Lisa Currie - Ripple Kindness Project
Lisa is passionate about contributing to a happier world by building emotional intelligence in kids through fun and engaging social-emotional learning resources. Her core value is kindness as she believes it to be the “mother” of all character traits. She started Ripple Kindness Project to spread kindness in schools and communities. She also founded an outreach program to support disadvantaged families.
My wife and I like to go to church with our children, but we often have to leave early because they get too anxious from all of the sitting. I like how you mentioned that coloring can have a calming effect on kids. It seems like it would be a good idea for us to get our children some coloring books so that they can have something to keep themselves busy with at church.
Great for adults too. When I was taking my mum for cancer treatment they had adult colouring books in the waiting room. They were great for calming our anxious minds as we usually had quite a wait.