Is your kid’s repetitive daily drawing a waste of time? A teacher’s perspective
Last month, during fall parent-teacher conferences, I sat across from Leo’s mom at my cluttered 2nd grade desk, a half-eaten peanut butter cup from the PTA gift basket melting next to my stack of progress reports. She scrolled through her camera roll for 10 seconds, then turned the screen toward me. There were 19 sequential photos, all of the same drawing: a chubby gray cat with a lopsided white stripe down its tail, sitting on a plaid blanket. “He does this every single night after homework,” she said, her voice tight with worry. “Forty minutes, sometimes an hour. It’s always the same cat. I keep asking him to draw something new, or practice his spelling words instead. Is this just a waste of time?”
That question hit close to home. Last year, my 7-year-old son spent two full months drawing nothing but garbage trucks. Every night after dinner, he’d drag out his crayon box and a stack of copy paper I brought home from school, and draw another garbage truck. My husband counted 62 of them taped to the inside of our garage door at the peak. “This can’t be normal,” he’d say, leaning against the fridge while I washed dishes. “He loses an hour every night that he could be doing reading flashcards, or learning to ride his bike without training wheels. Is this a waste of time?” I nodded along back then, because I’d had the same thought. I’m a teacher, I’m supposed to prioritize growth and productive time, right?
After Leo’s mom left that day, I kept thinking about those 19 cat drawings. The next morning, during free choice time, I wandered over to Leo’s table where he was already working on another one. I knelt down, didn’t say anything about the drawing being the same, just asked, “What’s her name?” He didn’t look up, just said “Mochi. She’s my cat. She has cancer, so she has to stay at the vet two nights a week for chemo.” I waited a minute, then asked why he draws her the same way every time. He pressed his crayon harder into the stripe on her tail. “If I get the stripe right, she knows I’m waiting for her. The vet takes good care of her, but I need to make sure the stripe is right so she doesn’t forget where home is.” I just sat there for a minute, and suddenly the 19 drawings on his mom’s phone weren’t a waste of time. They were the only way a 7-year-old knows how to process feeling scared and helpless when the thing he loves most is sick.
That night I went home and asked my son why he drew all those garbage trucks. He didn’t say anything for a minute, then mumbled, “Jake loved garbage trucks. The day he moved, we chased the garbage truck down the street. I want to remember what it looked like.” Jake was his best friend, who’d moved across the country three months before. I’d had no idea. I’d been so focused on whether the time was productive, I missed that it was how he was holding onto a memory he didn’t want to lose.
Over the past year, I’ve had this same conversation with at least 10 parents, about everything from repetitive drawing to building the same Lego castle over and over to rewatching the same 10 minutes of a cartoon on repeat. A lot of us default to “this is a waste of time” because it doesn’t check the boxes we’re used to: it doesn’t get a grade, it doesn’t teach a new obvious skill, it doesn’t look like progress to anyone on the outside. But there are small, concrete things you can do instead of cutting it short, that don’t take extra time or money.
First, instead of jumping in and telling them to try something new, ask one simple question: “What’s different about this one from the last one you made?” I started asking this, and almost every time, kids will point out a small change you didn’t notice. Leo draws Mochi with a little pink bow around her neck on weeks where she gets good news from the vet. My son added a sticker of a dinosaur to the back of the truck after I took him to the natural history museum. They’re not just repeating the same thing – they’re practicing control, processing small changes, adding pieces of their life to something that feels safe when everything else feels wobbly.
Second, if you’re worried about it cutting into time for homework or other activities, carve out 30 minutes of “your choice” time every day before you tackle anything else. Put it on the fridge calendar, same as soccer practice and piano lessons. That way it’s not a secret activity they hide from you, it doesn’t cut into homework time, and you don’t have to fight about stopping. When Leo’s mom started doing this, she told me a week later that he finished his homework 10 minutes faster every night just because he knew his drawing time was waiting for him.
Third, if the stacks of paper or half-taken-apart Lego builds are taking over your house, invite your kid to pick 10 of their favorites to keep in a bin, and take photos of the rest to save in an album on your phone. I did this with my son’s garbage trucks, and he picked his top 10 to keep in his closet, no fuss. He still flips through the photo album when he misses Jake.
Is it ever a waste of time? Sure. If your kid is skipping recess to draw, or stops hanging out with friends to build the same Lego over and over, that’s a sign you need to dig a little deeper. But most of the time, that thing that looks like a waste of time is just the way kids work through stuff that’s too big for them to put into words.
Last week, I found Leo’s mom in the grocery store, and she pulled out her phone to show me Mochi, home from the vet now, in remission. She also showed me the stack of drawings, taped to Leo’s bedroom wall. My son still draws a garbage truck once a month or so, now he adds his new friend’s name to the door. I still have his 10 favorites taped inside his closet, under his baseball trophies. It doesn’t get counted on any progress report, and it won’t show up on any college application. But that doesn’t mean it’s a waste.
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