I have a secret urge to throw a good portion of my young children's ‘art' in the bin

Irish Times

09-07-2025

Like many
parents
, I was recently inundated with my young children's artwork, projects and crafts from the classroom as the school year ended for summer.
Like many parents, I love and treasure my five- and eight-year-old children's sweet pictures and paintings. I have a growing pile on my bedside table with my most precious pieces. The ones with misspellings such as 'mamé' and 'luv'. The ones drawn super enthusiastically with buckets of innocent love that have unintentionally inappropriate anatomy. They never cease to make me smile. Seriously, who needs a trip over to the Tate Modern when you've got small kids who love to paint and draw? I give you the whole family looking like wonky potatoes on cardboard, or have you seen the critically acclaimed headless dad who appears to have three legs on lined copybook paper? Spellbinding.
However, like many parents, as much as I adore my small children's art, I also have the secret urge to throw a good portion of it in the bin. Yes, I said it. Welcome to the 'getting satisfaction out of throwing your children's artwork in the bin club'. Pull up a seat, this is a safe space, and no one is going to judge you. No one is going to label you a monster or accuse you of not loving and treasuring your children's artwork here, not on my watch.
As parents of young children, we know the truth; there is a fine line between those genuine heartfelt drawings (which we of course keep and cherish) and every single messy line scrawled on a scrap of paper that is sent home as 'art'. And let's face it, at this time of year, looking at much of what came home from creche or school by now, it feels a little like teachers were just cleaning their workspace rather than anything else.
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The guilt in binning is huge, however, and feels fiercely controversial, but you're not alone folks. There's an utterly relatable scene in BBC's
Motherland
, where the mums are presented with their children's science projects at the school gates. Each parent comments on 'how wonderful' it is before proceeding to chuck each one casually in the wheelie bin, rather than have to bring them home. I've been that soldier, and let me tell you I should have taken a leaf out of their book. Rather than haul home my eldest's makeshift tornado in the plastic water bottles that leaked weird blue water all over the car on the journey home, I should have put it in the bin.
It's not just your child's classroom art that starts to pile up either, their at-home output can be even more staggering. If your young child catches you trying to sneak some of their 'Van Goghs' into the bin, well God help you, as you try to come up with some excuse about what you are doing.
'Mummy, you're not throwing that in the bin, are you?' quizzed my five-year-old the other week using a tone similar to that of a senior counsel cross-examining a nervous witness, motioning to the dog-eared piece of paper with three random lines scrawled on it that had been balled up under his bed for about two months.
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'Er ... no. Of course not,' I said. 'I was just bringing it over to the window so I could get a better look at it.'
Worse still is when they actually find their artwork in the bin. That's the sort of Michael Corleone/Fredo level of betrayal that runs deep. I can remember my dad unknowingly hurling a beloved framed painting of mine in a skip as a young child and, let's just say, it still gets brought up from time to time.
It's only now that I'm a parent myself I get it. As much as you adore those drawings your small children bring you, you don't realise the sheer volume they can produce and how they can take over every surface of your home.
With my seemingly heartless throwaway attitude, you might be surprised to hear that I still have hoarder-level amounts of my kids' artwork in the attic, in bags, in drawers, shoved in beside the microwave or down the back of the cabinets. Every kitchen cupboard and wall downstairs is adorned with their creations. You could re-seed a sizeable portion of a rainforest with it all.
I can't possibly keep it up, and as much as I love hanging them on every surface in the house, I would also like a bit of space that is mine. As scarily savvy as ever, my social media algorithm is on the case, feeding me ads for seemingly genius extra-deep picture frames that allow parents to keep filling them with their children's works of art. It might be worth a punt, but the amount I'd have to shove in them would probably break the hinges.
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I have tried lots of other creative ways to put my children's paintings and drawings to good use. Turning them into birthday or Christmas cards is a lovely thing to do or even into wrapping paper, at a stretch. I rotate the gallery as often as I can and sometimes try to sit them down and ask if there's any they'd like to get rid of. There rarely is.
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If all else fails and the guilt is eating you alive, you can embrace technology and snap a picture of their art and store it in your cloud before you bin it. If you're anything like me, however, that digital copy will only add to your already bursting-at-the-seams photo cloud clutter that's filled with endless pictures of, yes, your kids.