Is my kid’s repetitive unstructured play a waste of time? What I learned as a teacher mom
It’s 4:15 on a Tuesday, I’m folding mismatched socks at the kitchen table, and my 7-year-old son Leo is spread across the floor, surrounded by 47 river rocks we collected on a hike last month. I’d reminded him 10 minutes earlier to get out his multiplication flashcards—he stumbled over the 6s at his last check-in, and I wanted to knock out 10 minutes of practice before I started browning ground beef for dinner.
Leo doesn’t look up when I clear my throat. “Just one more minute,” he says, squinting at a pale gray rock. “I’m getting all the grays sorted by how dark they are. This one’s almost blue, I don’t know where it goes.”
I glance at the clock, then at the eight wobbly lines of rock stretching from the fridge to the back door. I’m a 4th grade teacher, I spend all day talking about how important play is for kids, but in that moment, all I can think is: This is a waste of time. Other 7-year-olds are doing coding tutorials, finishing chapter books, practicing piano. Mine is rearranging rocks.
I step forward to nudge the rocks aside with my foot, miss, and step directly on a smooth round one that goes rolling out across the hardwood. I catch myself on the table edge, wincing, and that’s when the question pops out: “Leo, seriously. Is this whole thing just a waste of time?”
He blinks up at me, his forehead creased like I just asked him if breathing is a waste of time. “No,” he says, like it’s obvious. “Last week I sorted by size. The week before that I sorted by if they have sparkles. This week it’s color. Next week I’m gonna sort by how heavy they are to test which sink faster.”
That answer stopped me, because it reminded me of Mia, a student I had in my class two years ago. Mia would spend every single recess leaning against the playground wall, spinning the same chipped blue bottle cap over and over. Other staff would stop me and ask if I was gonna make her join the four-square game, that spinning a bottle cap every day was a waste of time, that she was falling behind on social skills. I nodded along back then, because I kind of thought the same thing. That changed when we did our force and motion unit a month later. I asked the class why some bottle caps spin longer than others, and every kid just stared. Mia raised her hand first, and explained that it depends on how hard you push, whether the ground is level, and even if the cap has a little chip on the edge that throws it off. She got it—deeper than any kid who’d completed the worksheet we sent home. She’d learned it all herself, spinning that cap every recess.
I leaned against the counter that Tuesday with Leo, and instead of scooping all his rocks into a bag and shoving them in the closet, I waited. I stood there for two minutes, just watching, and that’s when I heard him counting under his breath: “One dark gray, two, five… that’s five dark, plus four light, that’s nine total gray. Wait, I missed that one by the couch. That’s ten.” He was doing math, right there, before we even got out the flashcards.
That’s the thing no one tells you when you’re stressing about whether your kid’s weird little hobby is a waste of time. Most of the time, it’s not useless. It’s just learning that doesn’t look like learning. I’ve had so many parents email me asking if our 20 minutes of daily free choice time in class is a waste of time, if we should be doing more test prep instead. What I tell them now, after Leo and Mia, is this: you don’t have to take my word for it, just try one small thing. Next time you’re ready to cut your kid off from whatever weird thing they’re focused on, pause for two minutes and watch what they’re actually doing. Count how many skills they’re using that you didn’t even notice.
I’ve started making small changes that work for us, no big overhauls. First, I give a 10-minute heads up before we need to switch activities, instead of yanking him away mid-sort. That means I plan a little ahead, but it cuts out the meltdowns and lets him wrap up whatever system he’s building instead of leaving it half-done. Second, I gave him an old 18-inch baking tray to keep his rocks on. No more lines of rocks across the whole living room floor, no more stepping on them when I go to get a glass of water at night. It’s a small boundary that keeps both of us happy. Third, if I really do think we need to shift to something else, I ask him to tell me about his sorting first before he puts it away. That takes two minutes, and it makes him feel like what he’s doing matters, which it does.
Don’t get me wrong, I still have my moments. Two weeks ago we were running late for my niece’s birthday party, and Leo insisted he had to rearrange the sparkly rock group one more time before we could leave. We showed up five minutes late, and I was standing in the parking lot biting my tongue, thinking this is definitely a waste of time right now. But even then, I didn’t make him dump all the rocks haphazardly into the bag. I set the timer for two extra minutes, and we went.
It’s still something I’m working on. Unlearning the idea that only activities that look productive are actually productive. Some days I still wonder if we should be doing more flashcards, more structured activities, less rock sorting. But then Leo comes to me and explains why some rocks have more sparkles than others, or adds up the groups out of nowhere, and I remember: the time he spends sorting isn’t wasted. It’s just his way of learning how the world works, one rock at a time.
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