A lot of us start making art because we love it, then slowly turn it into something that has to be useful.

It has to sell, perform, fit a niche, please a client, match the room, build a brand, or at least become content. Somewhere along the way, making art for no reason other than wanting to make it starts to feel almost irresponsible.

That’s part of why the International Child Art Foundation caught my attention. Its programs treat creativity as something valuable on its own, not just as a skill children should polish into something impressive. The point isn’t only to make “good” art. It’s to help kids express themselves, understand other people, and hold onto the part of creativity that hasn’t yet learned to ask whether it’s marketable.

The International Child Art Foundation is a nonprofit built around the idea that children are creative, empathy can be learned, and art can help with both.

Which sounds obvious, but we also live in a world that tends to treat children’s art like something cute to hang on the fridge until the electric bill needs the magnet.

ICAF runs art programs for children around the world, including the Arts Olympiad and the World Children’s Festival. Kids get to make art, share it, meet other young artists, and see how children in completely different places experience the world.

What I like is that the focus isn’t just on teaching kids to draw more realistically or make something adults find impressive. It’s about helping them see themselves as creative people and helping them understand people whose lives might look nothing like their own.

KIDS' CARE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE: Through programs like the World Children's Festival, which begins with Health & Environment Day, young artists learn about our changing planet, find their voices, and discover that their creativity can inspire action: within their families, classrooms, and entire communities.

Art is really good at that.

You can learn a lot about someone from the kind of house they draw, the colors they use, the creatures they make up, or the tiny detail they insist on adding even though nobody else understands why it matters.

People put themselves into their art whether they mean to or not. Their fears show up. Their humor shows up. The things they miss, the things they want, and the things they don’t know how to say yet usually find their way in somewhere.

Sometimes art feels like seeing a little piece of someone’s soul before they’ve had time to clean it up for company.

Adults get very good at cleaning it up.

We learn to make things that look nice on the metaphorical fridge. Things people understand right away. Things that match the room, fit the trend, please the client, perform well online, or at least avoid making anybody uncomfortable.

Eventually, even our art starts asking permission before it exists.

There’s nothing wrong with making work that is beautiful, useful, or easy to understand. The problem is when we stop making anything too strange, too personal, too sad, too silly, or too difficult to explain.

We edit ourselves before the interesting part ever makes it onto the page.

That’s why it matters to encourage kids before they learn to do that. Let them draw the purple dog with seven legs. Let the house float. Let the sky be green because that was simply the correct color for the sky that day.

Let them make things that belong to them before they start wondering whether everyone else will like them.

Programs like ICAF give children a chance to make art, share it, and see that kids all over the world are doing the same thing in their own completely different ways.

The goal isn’t to raise children who make better refrigerator art.

It’s to raise children who don’t mistake the refrigerator for the whole world (or even worse, for Facebook)

World Children's Festival

The next World Children’s Festival is happening July 25–27, 2026, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The three days are organized around health and the environment, creativity and imagination, and peace and leadership, with workshops, art activities, and performances led by children and young people.

One of the planned projects is a Children’s Earth Flag, created collaboratively for NASA’s first human mission to Mars—which feels like exactly the sort of assignment children should be given more often. Not “draw this bowl of fruit correctly,” but “please help decide what humanity should send to another planet.” The activities are open to the public, although registration is required.

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