Is My Kid’s Doodling A Waste Of Time? What I Learned As A Mom And 4th Grade Teacher
Last Tuesday, I leaned against our kitchen table while my 10-year-old Leo worked through his 4th grade fraction homework. A half-eaten honey granola bar sat to his left, my cold coffee ringed the placemat, and when I glanced down at his worksheet, I saw what I see almost every night: the entire left margin was covered in tiny cartoon dinosaurs, each wearing a different silly hat. My first thought, the one that pops into my head before I can stop it, was the same one I get asked about once a month at parent-teacher conferences: Is this just a waste of time?
A couple of weeks before that, a mom named Sarah pulled her son’s math notebook across my desk during conferences, flipping past page after page of tiny rocket ships and stick figure explosions. “He’d finish every assignment twice as fast if he stopped drawing all over everything,” she said. “I keep telling him to stop at home, but he can’t. Am I wrong for thinking this is just a waste of time that’s holding him back?” I nodded along back then, because I used to think the same thing. When I was a new teacher, I’d call out kids for doodling during read alouds, take away extra paper when I caught them drawing during notes, and throw away pages full of doodles when cleaning out desks at the end of the year. It looked like distraction, like messing around, like time that could be spent better elsewhere.
That changed when Leo was in 2nd grade, and I made him stop doodling during homework for a whole week to “fix” the habit. Before that, he’d drawn on every margin, every scrap of paper, even the back of his spelling tests. That week, I made him use a blank piece of paper as a cover over his margins, told him his pen had to stay on the problem he was working on. What happened? He got frustrated over half the assignments, crumpled up three papers, took an average of 15 minutes longer per homework set, and got three times as many answers wrong as he normally did. On the seventh night, he burst into tears mid-multiplication problems and said, “My brain won’t stop jumping around if my hand isn’t doing something too.”
I started paying more attention, both at home with Leo and in my classroom with my students. I noticed that the kids who doodled the most weren’t the ones who didn’t pay attention—they were the ones whose brains get bored extra fast, or who get overstimulated by sitting still for too long. The doodling is the thing that keeps their brain from wandering off entirely. I started testing small changes instead of banning doodling altogether, and the results have been pretty clear.
Instead of telling kids they can’t doodle, I give them a dedicated space to do it. For my students, that means I leave a half-inch margin on every worksheet I print, and add a blank half-page at the back for any drawing they want to do. At home, Leo keeps a small sticky note pad next to his homework station, so he can doodle there instead of covering his entire worksheet if he gets stuck. It’s a tiny change, no extra work for me, and it cuts down on arguments before they start.
I also check in once in a while to see what they’re drawing, instead of just assuming it’s mindless. Leo draws dinosaurs when he’s stuck on hard problems—he says it’s like “giving my brain a minute to walk around” while it figures out the answer. One of my students draws portraits of all our class hamsters while we’re doing reading comprehension, and he scores higher on those questions than most of the kids who don’t doodle at all. It’s not messing around; it’s a tool their brains found to focus.
The only time I step in now is if doodling is actually getting in the way of work. If Leo is spending 30 minutes doodling and 5 minutes on his homework, I’ll say, “You can doodle for two minutes between each problem, and then you can draw for a whole hour after we finish homework and dinner.” That’s a clear boundary that doesn’t ban the thing his brain needs. For kids who get stuck covering the entire page so they can’t read their own work, the dedicated sticky note or back page solves that problem too.
I still have moments where it feels like a waste. Last week, we were running 10 minutes late to soccer practice, and Leo was standing by the door doodling a dinosaur on his shoelace with a Sharpie instead of putting his cleats on. I had to bite my tongue to not yell that he was wasting time. And last month, Leo’s math test came home with a note from his teacher asking us to discourage doodling on test sheets. I talked to her, explained what we’d noticed, and we agreed it was fine if Leo doodled on the back of the test once he finished all his answers.
It’s not a perfect system. Some days it still slows us down. Some parents still look at me like I’m making excuses when I tell them I let my kids doodle during class. But what I’ve learned is that a lot of the things that look like wasting time aren’t actually wastes at all. They’re just how a certain kid’s brain works. I don’t have all the answers, and we still adjust boundaries all the time. But these days, when I see a margin full of dinosaurs in hats, I don’t see a waste of time anymore. I just see a kid figuring out how to think.
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