This shift in mindset about the way preschoolers engage in creative work is a step in the right direction, but it doesnt go nearly far enough,argues. Weirdly, the process not product fixation fails children by at once giving them too much instruction and not nearly enough, landing children and their caregivers in a kind of middle ground that is not always very beneficial or even enjoyable, for that matter for anyone involved. In many classrooms, process art keeps too much of the boring mimicry for which crafts were originally derided while at the same time, it doesnt provide even the pretense of old-fashioned quality control or skill acquisition that the older method at least offered, Christakis writes.
