Colouring: the simple activity that stands the test of time (and screens)

At a time when children grow up surrounded by tablets and streaming cartoons, you might think colouring belongs to another era. The opposite is true. This activity keeps winning families over, and for good reason.

Ask any parent what actually keeps their kids busy on a rainy afternoon, without having to negotiate over screen time: coloured pencils often come up first.

More than a pastime

Behind its simplicity, colouring plays a real role in a child's development. Early-years specialists regularly point it out: it's a valuable step on the way to learning how to write.

But the benefits don't stop there. Choosing your colours, deciding how to fill in a space, is also a first form of self-expression. The child makes choices, takes decisions, asserts their tastes. And when they're happy with the result, the pride is instant. How many drawings end up proudly stuck to the fridge door? Unless it's just to get some peace at home?

There's also the calming side. Colouring demands concentration, slows the pace, channels energy. For a child who's wound up at the end of the day, it's often a gentle transition into a quieter moment. Even adults have taken it up again in recent years, with the success of anti-stress colouring books.

An activity that reinvents itself

Colouring is anything but a fixed activity. The classics never go out of style (animals, princesses, cartoon heroes), but new approaches keep appearing to refresh the fun.

One of these trends is to start from what the child already knows: their world, the people around them, their memories. Rather than a generic colouring page, picture one featuring the family cat, a holiday photo or a portrait of the whole family. The attachment is immediate, and the child gets far more involved.

That's exactly the idea behind tools like Coloriboo, a platform that turns a simple photo into a personalised colouring page. You upload an image and get back a clean-lined drawing, ready to print. A way to give children unique colouring pages that truly look like them, and that carry a sentimental value no book bought off a supermarket shelf will ever have.

Good old paper still has a future

What explains colouring's longevity is that it ticks a lot of boxes at once: inexpensive, easy to set up, suitable from a very young age, and just as welcome at home as at school or on a trip.

Paper, too, knows how to reinvent itself. Rather than a single sheet printed at home, some platforms like Coloriboo now offer to gather personalised colouring pages into a proper bound book, sent straight to your door. The object then takes on another dimension: you keep the book, you leaf through it, you give it to a grandparent. Hard to do the same with an app.

At a time when everyone's trying to cut down on screen time, giving manual activities their place back is essential.