What age do children colour inside the lines?
There's no official age at which a child colours inside the lines. An NHS leaflet on colouring describes four stages and doesn't put an age on any of them, and the Department for Education's early years guidance, Development Matters, says children's learning "is not so neat and orderly".
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Is it normal if they don't stay in the lines yet?
Yes, going over the lines is a normal part of the early stages. The leaflet, Colouring Development from the occupational therapists at Aneurin Bevan health board in Wales, sets out four of them: making marks on anything to hand, then colouring roughly at an object, then understanding where the boundaries are, then filling a space tidily. The Department for Education's guidance gives broad ages and stages too, and says it's "not designed to be used as a tick list".
You'll find ages online that say four, or five, or by their fifth birthday. Most of the ones I looked at came from American shops and therapy blogs rather than from anybody's health service, so I'd take them with a pinch of salt.
What staying in the lines shows
It's mostly a sign of pencil control. The NHS leaflet treats colouring as practice for how a child holds a pencil, how hard they press and how well they steer it, along with knowing where a boundary is. Staying inside the line is the bit you can see from across the table.
At its third stage the leaflet describes a child who has started "to show an understanding of the boundaries of the pictures, but may not yet have the pencil control to stay fully within the lines", so a child can know where the line is before their hand can follow it.
It also says staying in the lines takes practice and that some children find it hard.
What helps
A page with dozens of tiny areas is a lot harder to stay inside than one with a few big shapes, so a child who keeps going over might get on better with a simpler picture. Our guide to the photos that make the best colouring pages has more on which photos give a simpler page.
The NHS leaflet suggests starting with small pictures they can finish, then building up to bigger ones. It also suggests going over the outline with string or something chunky so the edge is something they can feel, and showing them that adults go outside the lines too.
The one thing I wouldn't do is point out where it went over, because every tip in that part of the leaflet is a way of helping without drawing attention to the mistakes, which seems like the right way round.
The leaflet's advice on colours is my favourite line in it: talk about the colours your child has chosen, "but accept their choice even if it seems unusual!"
Colouring things they recognise
With stories, children take more in when the story's about them. In one UK study, preschoolers learned new words better from the personalised parts of a book than from the generic parts, and another found that three- and four-year-olds remember material better when it's connected to them. Neither looked at colouring, but I'd guess it's the same there.
What I've seen with my kids is that they're properly into a page of somewhere we've been, and it's hard to pull them away.
Toodaloo books are made from your own photos, so the thing being coloured is a day the child was actually there for. If they want to colour the sea orange because that's their sea, that seems fair enough to me.
Make a book from the photos you've already got
Pick twenty photos off your phone, we draw them as colouring pages, and you see every page before you pay.
Any photos to start. Nothing is charged until you approve every page.