Sure, editing heavily may sound easy. But when faced with a stack of your beloved child's work, how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? The first step is to collect all his art in one place, so you can pick and choose. I like to do this as soon as the art enters the house, but some friends save everything for a year and then sort it all out at once. (If you do that, try to sort near Thanksgiving, so you can give some artwork away at Hanukkah or Christmas.) Now, the tough part--what to toss? I've developed this rule of thumb: If I hold up a drawing and it's simply stunning, I save it. If it doesn't knock my socks off, I take a deep breath and throw it out. I'm talking about at least a four-to-one ratio of chuck to save in the early years. Nobody I know chucks with the artist present.

Beauty is not the only reason to save a piece of art. Consider saving work that follows a motif--cars, boats, superheroes, dogs, monsters--or anything that shows a developmental jump. These might include the first basic scribbles, then shapes, the first sun, the first people and objects, and any self-portraits. Later, the first appearance of a horizon line and the first three-dimensional perspective of anything, even if it happens to be Aunt Gladys. For a good understanding of your child's artistic development, read Rhoda Kellogg's interesting and well-illustrated book ANALYZING CHILDREN'S ART (Mayfield Publishing).