Art Therapy for Teens: What It Is, What Works, and What a Parent Can Offer at Home

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Art therapy for teens is, in its proper sense, a mental health treatment in which a credentialed art therapist uses image-making within a therapeutic relationship to help an adolescent express, understand and work through what they are carrying. In everyday use the phrase also covers something looser: art activities a parent, carer or teacher offers a teenager because drawing is easier than talking. Both are legitimate. They are not the same thing, and the first job of this page is to keep them apart, because a parent who thinks they are doing therapy at the kitchen table, and a parent who thinks a worksheet is a substitute for treatment, are both heading for trouble.

In the United States, an art therapist holds a master's degree in art therapy or a related field with specific coursework and supervised clinical hours, and is credentialed by the Art Therapy Credentials Board as a Registered Art Therapist (ATR) and, after passing a board examination, as Board Certified (ATR-BC). A provisional credential (ATR-P) marks someone completing post-graduate supervision. A number of states also license art therapists or recognize them under counseling licenses. Someone running art therapy classes without that training may be a fine art teacher. They are not providing therapy, and the distinction matters most for a teenager whose distress is serious.

Adolescence is, in some ways, the age art therapy was made for. Teenagers are forming an identity, and much of what they feel has no settled language yet. They are acutely sensitive to being looked at, judged and questioned, and a direct "how are you feeling?" from an adult can end a conversation before it starts. Making an image shifts the attention from the teen's face to the paper, lets the adult sit alongside rather than opposite, and gives the teenager control over how much to reveal and when. Shirley Riley, who wrote the standard text on adolescent art therapy, argued that the image lets a teen say something before they have decided to say it. That is often the whole opening.

A directive, in art therapy language, is a prompt or task the therapist offers. Three have a long track record with adolescents. The bridge drawing, introduced by Hays and Lyons in 1981, asks for a bridge with something on each side, where the person is on it, and which way they are heading; it opens conversations about transitions, which is most of adolescence. The inside-outside mask asks for a mask or face outline decorated with what the teen shows the world on the outside and what they feel on the inside, and it gets at the gap between the two without naming it. A feelings color map asks for a body outline or a page divided into regions, with each feeling given a color and a place; it builds an emotional vocabulary that many teenagers, boys especially, have not been given. All three can be offered at home as activities. None of them should be read at home as a diagnosis.

The evidence for art therapy with adolescents is modest and should be described that way. The research with adolescents consists mostly of small studies, often without control groups, that vary so much in what art therapy meant that pooling them is hard. There are few large randomized trials. Where results have been pooled, as in a 2024 meta-analysis of six studies of art therapy for anxiety in 422 children and adolescents, the studies differed so much in intervention, setting and population that the pooled figure says little about any particular teenager or problem. So this page does not put a number on the benefit, and the home activities here have not been tested at all. What the evidence does not support is the idea that a drawing reveals hidden pathology: projective drawing tests, where a clinician reads personality or disorder from how a figure or a house is drawn, have poor validity, as Lilienfeld and colleagues documented in 2000. A credible art therapist does not read your teenager's drawing. They talk with the teenager about it.

At home, then, the honest claim is this: offering art is a good way to make space for a teenager to express something, to spend time alongside them without an interrogation, and to help them build words for feelings. It is not treatment for depression, an eating disorder, self-harm or trauma. If your teen is in that territory, the art activity can still be a bridge, but the destination is a clinician, ideally one who works with adolescents.

How you offer the activity decides whether it works. Put the materials out without a speech. Do a drawing yourself; a teenager will tolerate a parallel activity far better than being watched. Say nothing about skill, and nothing evaluative about the image. If they show you, ask open questions: tell me about this part; what is happening here; which side of the bridge are you on. If they do not show you, that is their right, and the activity still counted. Never post, share or tidy away a teen's artwork without asking. And never use what you saw in a drawing as evidence in a later argument. One betrayal of that kind closes the channel.

The common mistakes are predictable. Interpreting ("that black sky means you're depressed"). Over-asking, so the activity becomes the interrogation it was meant to avoid. Pushing a reluctant teen, which teaches them that art is one more thing adults want from them. Treating the activity as a one-off intervention after a crisis rather than a regular, low-pressure presence. And using art therapy as a cheaper stand-in for an assessment when the warning signs are already there.

See a professional if your teenager's artwork repeatedly shows self-harm, death or themes that frighten you; if they are withdrawing, sleeping or eating very differently, or talking about not wanting to be here; or if the problem that brought you to this page has lasted more than a few weeks. An art therapist with adolescent experience is a reasonable first call, and so is any licensed child and adolescent therapist. If a teenager says they are thinking about suicide, take it seriously, stay with them, and in the US call or text 988. Our Art Therapy Activities page has prompts written for adults, the Identifying Emotions Worksheet pairs well with the feelings color map, and the Emotional Regulation Activities for Kids and Parenting Worksheets pages cover younger children.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the distinction between credentialed art therapy and home art activities, the credential descriptions, the three directives, and the summary of what the evidence does and does not support.

References

1. Malchiodi CA, ed. Handbook of Art Therapy. 2nd ed. Guilford Press; 2012.
2. Riley S. Contemporary Art Therapy with Adolescents. Jessica Kingsley Publishers; 1999.
3. Hays RE, Lyons SJ. The bridge drawing: A projective technique for assessment in art therapy. The Arts in Psychotherapy. 1981;8(3-4):207-217.
4. Lilienfeld SO, Wood JM, Garb HN. The scientific status of projective techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 2000;1(2):27-66.
5. Art Therapy Credentials Board. ATR-P, ATR and ATR-BC credentials. https://www.atcb.org/
6. Zhang B, Wang J, Abdullah AB. The effects of art therapy interventions on anxiety in children and adolescents: a meta-analysis. Clinics (Sao Paulo). 2024;79:100404.

Art Therapy for Teens FAQ