Is My Kid’s Unstructured, Silly Play A Waste Of Time? What I’ve Learned As A Mom And 4th Grade Teacher
Last Saturday, I was folding a pile of soccer uniforms and school hoodies at the kitchen table when I glanced over at my 10-year-old son Jax. He’d been hunched over his own pile of scrap paper for 45 minutes, folding one lumpy origami frog after another. My to-do list was scribbled on a sticky note by the coffee pot: book report outline, mend cleat hole, practice spelling words. I’d been waiting for him to wrap up whatever this was and get to work, and I was half a second away from saying, “Isn’t that a waste of time? You can mess with that after you finish your homework.”
Then I remembered the email I’d gotten from a parent just two days before, after fall conferences. Her 9-year-old daughter spends every recess drawing cartoon dragons in the corner of the playground instead of running around playing kickball with the other kids. “I keep telling her she should join the game, get some exercise, make more friends,” she wrote. “But she just wants to draw. Is this a waste of time?”
I thought about Mia, a 5th grader I taught when I was a new teacher 12 years ago. Mia spent every free minute at school braiding friendship bracelets, over and over, 10 or 12 a week. I kept redirecting her: “You can do this after school. Pull out your reading book, this is time for learning.” I thought she was just avoiding work, wasting time that could be spent getting ahead. One day I caught her tucking a bracelet into the desk of a new girl who’d joined our class that month, who ate lunch alone every day. “She’s scared to talk to people,” Mia told me, quiet like she thought I’d yell. “If she has my bracelet, she knows someone here likes her.” I left her alone after that, and I’ve never forgotten that moment. I’d called what she was doing a waste, but she was doing the most important work you can do at 10 years old: learning how to be kind, how to see people who are hurting.
So instead of saying what I was going to say to Jax, I pulled up a chair and asked him to show me what he was working on. He’d already tested four different kinds of paper: copy paper, construction paper, wrapping paper scrap, and a sheet of tissue paper he’d stolen from my junk drawer. He’d written all his results on the back of an old Cheerios box, messy numbers crossed out when he measured a jump wrong. He was trying to figure out which paper weight made frogs jump the farthest, and then he was going to test how the angle of the back leg fold changed the distance.
That’s when it hit me: this wasn’t wasting time. This was a middle school-level science experiment, done on his own time, because he was curious. He practiced measuring with a ruler, he did trial and error, he adjusted his guess when his first test didn’t work. By the time he wrapped up his experiment, I’d finished all my laundry, and he sat down and banged out his book report outline in 25 minutes, focused, because he’d already gotten the thing his brain was stuck on out of his system.
We ask “is this a waste of time” so often as parents and teachers, but almost always the answer depends on whose agenda we’re following. If the activity fits our list of important things—flashcards, soccer practice, book reports—it counts. If it doesn’t check a box, it feels like a waste. That doesn’t mean it actually is.
I’ve started doing three small things that work for me both at home and in my classroom, and they’ve cut down on how often I mislabel something as wasted time. First, when I’m tempted to interrupt, I stop and do a 10-minute check-in instead. I just ask them to tell me what they’re working on, no judgment. I ask, “What’s the most interesting thing you’ve found so far?” or “What are you trying to figure out?” Nine times out of ten, I walk away realizing it’s way more purposeful than it looked from the outside.
Second, I build 20 minutes of unstructured “anything goes” time into the daily schedule, no screens allowed. At school, that’s right after morning work, before we start reading. At home, that’s right after homework before dinner. I used to think that 20 minutes was time I’d never get back, but I’ve noticed kids transition to focused work way faster when they get to mess around with whatever their brain is fixated on first. It’s a net gain, not a loss.
Third, I only step in if the activity is crowding out something the kid actually cares about. If Jax skipped the soccer practice he begged me to sign him up for every week just to fold frogs, or if he was failing math because he folded frogs during class every day, I’d set a boundary. But 90% of the time, the problem is my agenda, not their activity.
Last month, one of my students who struggles with writing spent every free minute making up silly rap songs about the characters in our class read aloud. I used to ask him to put the notebook away, until I realized he was writing whole verses, using rhyming, summarizing the plot, and even editing lines to make them fit the rhythm. When we did our end-of-book project, he turned his rap in, and it was one of the clearest, most memorable summaries I got all year. He got an A, and he still talks about that project three months later.
Jax’s best origami frogs are still sitting on our kitchen windowsill. He brought three of them to show his science class last week, and his teacher did a whole 10-minute mini lesson on variables from his experiment. I still catch myself sometimes, when Jax is flipping a baseball in the air over and over for 20 minutes instead of starting his piano practice, and I have to bite my tongue. Some days I slip, I rush him and tell him to hurry up and get to the thing on my list. I don’t have it all figured out. But more often than not now, I just pause. What looks like a waste of time to me is usually just learning that doesn’t fit my checklist. And that’s the kind of learning that sticks around.
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