Children's kinetic family drawings and their internalizing problem behaviors

Abstract

The current paper aims to identify whether kinetic family drawings (KFD) are useful to identify internalizing problems of preschoolers. We divided 120 preschoolers into two groups based on their scores of an internalizing problem behavior test and the KFD of the two groups were compared. Except for a few sub-categories, we found some significant differences in most subcategories between these two groups. This contrast suggests that projective approaches using the KFD are useful in evaluating the cognitive characteristics of a family in order to understand a child's internalizing problem behaviors. The usefulness of an approach using the KFD in education and clinical fields are also discussed.