What happens when children are asked to draw lockdown from memory? These pictures often show cheerful, colorful moments—but older children frequently leave their own faces, or even themselves, out of the scene. During lockdown, outdoor activities were limited or banned, and children had to cope with loneliness, insecurity, and instability in their daily routines.

Fear, loneliness, and boredom permeated children’s pandemic experiences, while international research reported effects on the psychological state of approximately seventy-nine point four percent of children. At the same time, children also responded with resilience and adaptability.

Some used the period to spend more time with family, start hobbies, take care of themselves, and adopt a slower pace of life. Freehand drawing can communicate experiences, perceptions, or attitudes toward an event, and it offers children advantages over verbal methods.

Drawing helps children communicate what is not easily put into words, extending the voice and participation of children who are more hesitant to speak or share ideas. Through drawings, children graphically and emotionally represent what they consider significant according to their understanding and interpretation of an event.

The study used a retrospective-descriptive design to analyze how children remembered their lockdown experiences, related their emotions, and depicted those experiences through drawings. The observational work combined qualitative and quantitative content analyses with statistical exploration of associations involving gender and school-level groups.

The first research question asked how children represented themselves, other people, places, and objects when thinking back to lockdown. The second research question asked which subjects, places, and actions were represented most commonly. The third research question asked what emotional content and types of relationships were reproduced.

The study also hypothesized differences based on gender or school level. Sixty classes from three school districts in Umbria, central Italy, took part in the program; seventy-two percent were primary-school classes and twenty-eight percent were middle-school classes.

Fifty-four teachers administered the program to nine hundred and six students aged seven to thirteen, with forty-eight point eight percent female and a mean age of nine point four years. The drawings were analyzed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis to address the first and second research questions.

This technique allowed qualitative and inductive determination of constructs of interest, alongside quantitative assessment of their prominence in relation to specific research questions. Content analysis can extract meanings from children’s drawings and make sense of their understanding, attitudes, and experiences of a specific topic.

Several scales of the PAIR coding system—Pictorial Assessment of Interpersonal Relationships—were used to address the third research question. PAIR is a psychological instrument developed to organize and code drawings representing relationships and emotions, with six scales that can be used independently.

The Scale of Value identified the self as the character with the highest score based on dimensions, position on the page, body details, and colors. The first and last authors inductively assessed the drawings to develop a coding scheme reflecting basic characteristics such as color and framing, as well as lockdown content such as loneliness, screentime, and social activities.

The researchers open-coded forty randomly selected drawings, then calculated Cohen’s kappa for each code; consistency values ranged from zero point seven two to zero point nine four. The codebook included labels, definitions, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and examples.

Answers occurring below five percent were grouped with similar codes or placed in an other category. Quantitative content analysis determined the statistical relevance of drawing details, but broader codes could lose the depth, richness, and texture of children’s drawn experiences.

To preserve that depth, the researchers conducted a secondary, in-depth qualitative inductive content analysis on selected drawings representing each analyzed code or overarching theme. Of the nine hundred and six participants, nine hundred completed the drawing activity.

The drawings were analyzed using the coding scheme, and the main results were reported in Table 2. Qualitative comments were integrated into the results paragraphs alongside the quantitative data. Most children used colorful representations, at seventy-five percent, and full-body views, at sixty-four percent.

Colorful and full-body representations were more prevalent among primary-school students. Among middle-school students, forty-two percent of pictures showed the self either missing or represented by a back view. Other people were present in sixty-one percent of drawings.

Figure 2 shows two people viewed from behind, seated and facing a television. The screen displays counts for contagions, recovered people, and deaths, while the figures themselves remain static and visually indistinct within a large, empty white space.

The authors use this drawing as an example of a “void representation,” illustrating how technology and pandemic information could dominate children’s depictions during lockdown, when screentime activities were the most represented category. Screentime activities were the most represented activity, appearing in forty-four percent of drawings, with an overall prevalence among middle-school children.

Technology was used passively by most children in seventeen point twenty-two percent of drawings, while information and communication technology appeared without people in another nine point fifty-six percent. Older children represented distance learning more often, and nine point twenty-two percent used technology more actively, including chatting and working on a computer.

One example shows two girls using a chat app to stay in touch and make plans; the friend’s face is colored and detailed, while white space gives a sense of isolation that the relationship appears to alleviate. Figure thirteen shows two girls actively using information and communication technology to chat during lockdown: one appears on the device screen, while the other imagines riding bicycles together afterward.

The drawing captures technology as a way to maintain social connection, rather than merely as passive entertainment. This matters because the authors report that females used ICT more actively, illustrating how children represented relationships and hoped-for shared activities through screens.

Most children, sixty-eight point eleven percent, drew the interior of their houses. The outside world was completely absent in fifty-nine point eleven percent of pictures, with a slight prevalence among middle-school children.

The PAIR scale could be applied only to two hundred and fifty-seven drawings depicting two or more people, so the following emotional and relationship data apply only to this subsample. This subsample was fifty-five percent female, had a mean age of nine years, a standard deviation of one point six years, and an age range from seven to thirteen years.

Contentment, defined here as positive emotions, appeared in most PAIR-analyzed drawings, at sixty point ninety-three percent, with a prevalence among primary-school students and females. Neutrality appeared in thirty-three point ninety-eight percent and was more common among middle-school students and males.

Discontent or hostility was seldom detected, appearing in five point zero nine percent of drawings. Table 3 summarizes how two hundred fifty-seven selected PAIR items represented emotions, emotional climate, and conflict, with comparisons by primary versus secondary subjects and by male versus female participants.

Contentment accounted for 156 items, or 60.93 percent, while shared emotions accounted for 152, or 59.14 percent; no conflict was reported in 251 items, or 97.67 percent. The authors use these patterns to examine children’s recalled experiences while allowing them freedom to choose what to draw and report.

Shared neutrality appeared in thirty point seventy-four percent of drawings and was more frequent among middle-school students and males. Unilateral or opposite emotions were rare, appearing in ten point twelve percent of drawings. The example shows a child on the right excluded from playing with two subjects in the middle; the child’s body is blue and shows a sad expression.

The example connects the memory of lockdown with difficult or negative experiences for some children, rather than a uniformly happy family environment. Figure twenty shows a child’s drawing with two children playing together near the center, while a third child stands apart on the right.

The isolated child has a blue body and a sad expression, contrasting with the more connected central figures. The authors classify this as an example of opposite emotions, illustrating how the Whole Child Development perspective can capture social exclusion and family or peer tensions rather than reducing children’s experiences to a checklist of symptoms.

The study’s generally positive images of lockdown contradict research reporting fear, anxiety, and depressive problems among children and adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. One possible reason for this discrepancy is the socioeconomic characteristics of the sample.

The schools were based in the Umbrian countryside, an area usually populated by middle- or working-class families. Most children chose to depict a cheerful moment, and the quantitative data suggest several co-factors contributing to a positive recall of lockdown.

Those co-factors included play and physical activities, activities with family members, interaction with a pet, and active information and communication technology use for peer communication. These factors share an active, affective relationship with others. Children who depicted contentment were usually engaged in a task involving a relationship with someone.

That relationship often occurred within the family, around the house with friends, when open spaces were accessible, or in a solitary play world. The main limitations were the limited provenance of the subjects and the inevitably subjective interpretation of the drawings.

Because of COVID restrictions, the researcher could not control administration of the classroom task, although standardized instructions were used for children and teachers. All children completed the task in their classroom, at a comparable time, and under the same circumstances.

The participants’ drawings were also used to substantiate interpretations of the quantitative analysis. Despite many studies reporting that children suffered during COVID-19 lockdown, these results suggest a different narrative. When children freely recalled lockdown, most—especially younger children—depicted joyful moments, and their pictures conveyed resilience, security, and agency.

The findings could indicate that difficult lockdown times became a natural part of children’s daily lives, while the voids drawn during the pandemic were later ready to be populated once normal life returned. The drawings suggest that play, relationships, pets, and active technology use helped children recall lockdown positively, while older children’s missing self-representations point to the possible impact of isolation on how they perceived themselves.