When children were asked to draw their lockdown lives, many did not draw the outside world at all. And among older children, the child in the picture was often missing—or had no face. The study asked how primary and middle-school children perceived Italy’s first lockdown through their drawings.

After schools reopened, children were asked to draw a moment from life during lockdown. The drawings were coded and examined both quantitatively and qualitatively, allowing researchers to identify recurring patterns across the pictures.

That approach also offered a valuable window into children’s emotions and perceptions, helping researchers consider their understanding, feelings, and experience. The study looked at how children remembered their own lockdown experiences, related their emotions, and depicted these through their drawings.

The work compared different responses by gender and school level, asking whether children’s pictures changed with age or differed between girls and boys. The drawings were read for meanings, helping researchers make sense of the children’s understanding, attitudes, and experiences of the topic.

At the same time, quantitative analysis counted how prominent those constructs were across the drawings in relation to the specific research questions. This kind of reading can extract meanings from children’s drawings and make sense of their understanding, attitude, and experience of a specific topic.

Most of the children completed the drawing activity. Their drawings were analyzed using a coding scheme, and the main results were reported in a table. Comments about the meanings in the drawings were brought together with the numerical results, so the pictures and the counts informed the same account.

Most children drew themselves with color and a full body. But in almost half of the pictures made by older students, the self was missing or had no visible face. That difference matters because the older children’s own presence in the scene was less clearly shown: they were often missing or lacked visible faces.

Most children drew the inside of their houses, while the outside world was completely invisible in over half of the pictures. The lockdown was therefore often pictured as a life contained indoors. Among younger students, playing or sport appeared most often, followed by screen time or technology use.

Domestic routines and distance learning were also depicted. With a play buddy present, the child’s imagined world becomes fuller: two children share the same ground, face one another, and move toward a shared activity. That closeness suggests connection rather than isolation during lockdown.

Most children, especially girls, drew characters showing emotional closeness. Younger pupils and girls more often depicted contentment as their main emotion, while conflicting emotions were almost absent. The drawings therefore did not mainly present lockdown as open conflict; conflicting emotions were virtually non-existent, while most children depicted emotional cohesion and contentment.

They also showed ordinary life within the home, including playing, sport, screen use, domestic routines, and distance learning during lockdown. Contentment, meaning positive emotions, appeared in most of the drawings examined for emotion.

It was more common among primary-school children and girls. Neutrality was more common among middle-school children and boys. Discontent or hostility was seldom detected. The study has important limits: the children came from a limited set of places, and interpreting drawings is inevitably subjective.

The researcher also could not control everything about how the classroom activity was administered. Standard instructions and similar classroom conditions were used to improve consistency, and the drawings were used to support the interpretations of the numerical results.

The results suggest a different story from the idea that children’s lockdown memories were mainly about suffering. When invited to remember freely, most children—especially younger ones—depicted joyful moments. Their pictures conveyed resilience, security, and agency, offering a different narrative from reports that children suffered during the lockdown period.

The difficult period may therefore have become part of their ordinary daily lives, rather than appearing only as a crisis to them. When ordinary life returned, the children were ready to fill the empty spaces they had drawn during the pandemic, according to the study. Their pictures also transmitted a sense of resilience, security, and agency, portraying children’s lockdown experiences in notably positive terms overall.

These drawings suggest that younger children found safety and activity in play, screens, and home life, while older children more often showed the loneliness of losing direct contact with other people.