Colors play an important role when it comes to decorating your baby’s nursery or redecorating your toddler’s room. It’s imperative to choose the right colors that will excite your children and choosing the right colors is a tough decision. You require knowing about the different colors and how they can affect your children psychologically.
Colors should be used as tools to communicate with children as children love colors and respond to their language easily. Children learn to distinguish colors very early and can easily distinguish different colors as early as six months. Many toddlers reach out for colors that are attractive and eye catching. Red is a color that attracts children very quickly followed by yellow and other colors like blue, green, orange. As children grow, girls tend to prefer colors like violet, pink and lavender while boys love darker colors like blue, brown and black.
Colors and Their Meaning
- White: It symbolizes joy, peace, purity and cleanliness.
- Yellow: It soothes the nerves by providing a calming effect and it also is known to stimulate muscle activity.
- Blue: Confidence, peace and wisdom is what this color signifies and it can help calm your child’s nerves and provide good sleep at night
- Green: This is a color that signifies refreshment and it helps reinforce self esteem and kindles hope. It is a very uplifting color and ideally suited for children who are low in self esteem and feeling depressed.
- Red: Red is an attractive color that signifies passion, desire and makes your child excited.
- Purple: This color signifies power, luxury and royalty when they appear in darker shades. The lighter shades of purple like violet and lavender provide a peaceful atmosphere and help soothe the nerves. The very darker tones of purple are not recommended as they can evoke feelings of frustration and sadness in children. Children don’t take to these colors so easily.
- Earthy Tones: Beige, brown and grey are some earth tones. These are colors ideal for children who are hyperactive and bursting with energy. They provide relaxation, warmth, comfort.
How Colors Affect Children?
Colors can help stimulate children, especially those with attention deficit disorder. With colors, children learn to express themselves and when they are allowed to choose colors to decorate their rooms or select their clothing they become more self confident and open up to more creativity and expression. Colors can express various emotions which children find difficult to express.
'Color your life' is the technique employed by psychologists and psychotherapists to help children distinguish and express their various emotions on paper. This technique helps to find out if your child is happy, sad, excited, frightened or even angry. Psychologists provide a box of basic colored crayons to children along with paper and ask them to draw and color a picture. The child is asked to choose a color to denote a particular feeling. If the child chooses red, orange and grey then he/she is feeling angry, happy and lonely. The mood of the child can be gauged by the colors he/she chooses to color on paper and the intensity with the child uses it.
Children should be free to choose the colors they like, as forcing those to choose a particular color can lead them to become rebellious. With colors, children develop self esteem and self affirmation. Children are more attracted to colors like yellow, red, blue rather than colors like black, grey and brown. The bright colors excite them as they find them very attractive and pickup toys that are brightly colored and express their joy when playing with them.
The department of Child Development in California State University Fullerton conducted a study on colors and children’s emotional association and came up with these conclusions. In the study, children of both gender, aged between five and six were asked to pick their favorite colors from nine colors provided which were shown to them randomly. They were asked the question “How does this color make you feel” and 69% of the children picked bright colors like pink, blue, red and expressed their happiness and excitement. Some picked black, grey and brown showing negative emotions like sadness. Children showed a tendency to choose brighter colors and disliked dark colors. As children advanced in age, the girls tend to pick colors that are brighter showing their happy emotions and excitement like pink, red, yellow that reflected in their dressing and the way they used these colors to decorate their rooms, while boys picked colors like beige, blue, brown and black to express their emotions.
Colors play an important role in child psychology and whether you plan on decorating your baby’s room or redecorating your toddler’s bedroom. It’s important you pick the right colors they would enjoy and remain happy. As children grow up, they should be allowed to select the colors that they like as it allows them to express their mood and inner emotions.
