Children’s drawing of friendship and family relationships in different cultures

This chapter is part of the first international volume to focus explicitly on children’s knowledge and interpretations of pictorial representations, including their understanding of the role of the artist as producer of pictures and of the viewer as beholder of pictures, in the context of their developing abilities to understand and produce pictorial representations. It particularly addresses what children of different ages and of different cultures know about the nature of pictures as representations of the social world, as intentional communications conveyed by drawer, as well as what children of different ages and culture understand about the different ways to depict interpersonal relationships. This chapter is aimed to increase researchers’ understanding of children’s symbolic and representational development, and of the role culture plays in young children’s grasp of what pictures can say about their social knowledge.