Is my kid’s constant doodling a waste of time? What elementary teachers see that you don’t
Last Tuesday I pulled a wobbly plastic chair beside Mia’s 4th grade desk during independent reading block, and the first thing I saw wasn’t her open copy of Wonder – it was three full pages of tiny, carefully drawn cats. Every cat had a different accessory: one wore a sequined cowboy hat, another had a lopsided tutu, a third held a popsicle that dripped blue ink all the way down the margin. Mia didn’t even look up when I sat down, just kept shading the fur of a fourth cat with her chipped sky-blue pencil. That night, I got an email from her mom: “I see this every night when she does homework. She can’t get through a math worksheet without drawing all over the margins. Is this just a waste of time that’s going to hold her back from focusing?”
I get this question at least once a week from parents, about all kinds of things: endless doodling, hours of building cardboard forts in the backyard, re-watching the same 10 minutes of a YouTube video over and over, even just sitting on the swing staring at the sky instead of doing flashcards or coding practice. The question is always the same, unspoken but hanging there: Is this thing a waste of time?
I get the impulse. I’m a teacher and a mom of a 10-year-old, and I’ve caught myself staring at my son sprawled on the living room floor folding origami dinosaurs for the third hour in a row, wondering if he should be practicing his piano instead. A couple of years ago, my brother came over for a barbecue and watched my son haul a dozen old Amazon boxes out to the backyard to build another fort, one he’d just take apart two days later. “That’s such a waste of time,” he said, flipping a burger. “He could be working on his travel soccer drills right now.”
At that point, I’d already been watching my students long enough to have a hunch that wasn’t true, but Mia’s question drove it home for me again. After she finished shading that cat’s ear, I asked her to tell me what had happened in the chapter she just finished. She closed her book, looked up at me, and replayed the whole scene where Auggie meets Jack Will for the first time, even remembering the throwaway line about Auggie’s astronaut helmet that half the kids who’d taken formal notes on the chapter missed. The doodles weren’t taking her focus away from the reading – they were helping her hold it.
I’ve tested this with dozens of kids over the last five years. The kids who doodle, who fidget with a rubber band around their pencil, who build tiny block towers while they listen to read-aloud – most of them can answer any comprehension question I throw at them as quickly, if not more quickly, than the kids who sit perfectly still with their hands folded taking neat notes. Our default is that anything that isn’t the work itself is a waste of the work’s time, but a lot of the time, that “extra” thing is what lets the work get done. Different brains need different kinds of background noise or low-stakes movement to hold focus on the hard part.
I emailed Mia’s mom back with two small things to try, no big changes required. First, next time she caught Mia doodling while doing homework, instead of immediately taking the pencil away, ask her one quick question about the work she’s supposed to be doing. If she can answer it correctly, leave it be. If she can’t, then ask her to put the doodle away for 10 minutes and come back to it after she finishes the assignment. Second, if the doodles are covering up her actual work so she can’t study from it later, give her one dedicated page at the back of each notebook for doodling, so it stays out of the way of the notes.
She wrote back three days later saying it worked better than she expected. She’d caught Mia doodling clouds and raindrops in the margin of her water cycle worksheet, asked her to explain what condensation was, and Mia walked her through it step by step, pointing to her little doodles as examples. The doodling wasn’t taking away from the work – it was helping her process it.
With my son’s forts, I got the same proof a few months back. His class assigned a project to build a working model bridge that could hold as much weight as possible. Most parents bought pre-cut wood kits from the craft store, or ordered 3D printed parts online. My son built his entirely out of cardboard he’d saved from my Amazon orders, cutting tiny notches into the edges to lock the sides together, just like he did for his forts. His bridge held 12 pounds of textbooks before it cracked, good enough for second place. When his teacher asked him where he learned to cut the notches like that, he said “from taking apart my forts every weekend.”
I don’t mean to say that nothing is ever a waste of time. Sometimes a kid will zone out so hard doodling that they miss the whole lesson. Sometimes my son will spend an hour scrolling mindless TikTok reels and can’t tell me a single thing he watched, and that ends with me asking him to put the phone down and go outside. The trick isn’t to let kids do whatever they want all day – it’s to not write off the thing that looks like nothing before you check what it actually is.
I still have the little cat doodle Mia tore out of her notebook and gave me a week after our chat, taped to the edge of my desk. It’s wearing a little apple that says “Ms. L” on it. I get a new question from a parent about whether something is a waste of time every week, and I never have a perfectly neat answer. What works for me, most days, is to stop before I say “put that away” and ask one question first. Some days that means we leave the doodle, some days it means we put it away. No big rule, no grand philosophy. Just checking what the kid actually needs, instead of assuming anything that doesn’t look like work is a waste.
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