Scribble is about movement, and it is not a failed picture.

The earliest marks are a record of an arm learning what it can do.

The first marks a child makes are not attempts at anything. They are the visible trace of a movement that is interesting in its own right. A back and forth sweep, then a loop, then a loop repeated until the paper goes dark in the middle, then dots produced by stabbing, then a long line pulled off the edge of the sheet and onto the table. The child is not trying and failing to draw a cat. They are discovering that an arm attached to a hand attached to a tool leaves a track, and that they control the track, which is a genuinely astonishing thing to find out.

Because there is nothing to recognise, this is the phase adults most often skip past or hurry along. It is worth resisting. The control being built here underlies everything that follows, and it is built by repetition rather than instruction. A child who does the same looping motion forty times is not stuck. They are practising, in the way anyone practises, and the fortieth loop is different from the first even if it does not look different to you. Sit near them, give them more paper, and let the repetition run its course.

This phase arrives and departs at very different points for different children, and there is no timetable worth holding them to. Some children scribble for a long while and then change quickly. Some drift back into pure movement long after they have started making shapes, particularly when they are tired, or when the material is new, or when the sheet is unusually large. That is not regression. Every material has to be learned again from the beginning, and a child meeting a new tool will often start by simply finding out how it moves, which is exactly the right way to begin.