Is My Kid’s Endless Doodling a Waste of Time? What I Learned As a Teacher and Mom
Last Tuesday night, I was hunched over the kitchen table grading 32 rough drafts of personal narratives, the smell of burnt microwave popcorn sticking to my sweatshirt, when I glanced over at my 10-year-old Lila. She was supposed to be halfway through her 20-problem fraction review packet, with soccer practice kicking off in 20 minutes. Instead, her pencil was moving so fast it blurred, drawing tiny tabby cats with striped scarves on the margin of every page. She’d already decorated the back of my grocery list, the heel of her sock, and the sticky note I’d used to mark my grading stack. “Lila,” I said, my voice sharper than I meant it, “that’s the third night this week you’ve spent more time doodling than doing your work. Is this really a waste of time?” She froze, then flipped her notebook closed so hard the eraser fell out of her pencil. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “It’s just easier than fractions.”
That question has been bouncing around my inbox as a teacher for years. Just two days after that kitchen moment, I sat across from Javi’s mom at a fall parent-teacher conference. Javi, one of my brightest 7th graders, spends almost every class period drawing post-apocalyptic comic strips in the back of his notebook instead of writing down essay notes. His mom told me she’d thrown away three sketchbooks in two months, grounded him from all art supplies until his grades went up, and still couldn’t get him to stop. “I just don’t get it,” she said. “It’s a waste of time, and it’s ruining his chances of getting into good high school classes.” I found myself saying, before I even thought about it, “What if it’s not just wasted time?” That’s when I realized I’d been saying one thing to parents and panicking over the same thing with my own kid.
I started paying closer attention to my students a few years back, after reading a small study on doodling and focus. I did a casual check of my classes: I tracked who doodled during lecture notes and who didn’t, then compared their exit quiz scores. What I found surprised me: the doodlers averaged 2% higher than the kids who sat perfectly still, hands folded, no drawings anywhere. It wasn’t a huge difference, but it was enough to make me stop and think. Doodling doesn’t pull attention away from the task for most kids—it keeps their overactive brain occupied just enough that the actual information can stick. For kids who get overwhelmed by hard work, it’s a pressure release valve, not a distraction.
That’s what I realized I’d been missing with Lila. Math has always felt hard for her, and instead of letting her use the thing that calmed her brain down, I was telling her to put it away and push through the stress. After that Tuesday night, I changed our homework routine instead of banning doodles. We picked up a cheap 50-page sketchbook at the dollar store that lives right next to her homework folder. I told her: before you start each set of 10 math problems, you can doodle for 5 full minutes. No drawing on the homework, no doodling during the problems, but that 5 minutes is all yours. If you finish all your work 10 minutes early, you can doodle for extra time before practice. I didn’t make a big deal out of it, just changed the rule.
What happened? The first week, she finished all her homework on time four out of five nights. Before that, it was two out of five. She still gets carried away sometimes—last week, she spent 45 minutes drawing an entire cat amusement park instead of studying for her spelling test, and came home with a B minus. We talked about it, adjusted the rule: if it’s a test night, extra doodle time moves to after you finish studying. That’s it, no taking away the sketchbook, no yelling, no grounded.
I’ve started telling parents who ask me if any activity—doodling, building Lego, making TikTok skits, even just wandering the backyard looking for rocks—is a waste of time, to stop asking that question first, and ask two smaller, clearer ones instead. First: is this activity actually keeping them from getting their required work done most days? If your kid spends 3 hours making friendship bracelets every night and never finishes their homework, that’s a problem to adjust, not a waste of time to ban entirely. Second: do they light up when they talk about it, or reach for it when they’re stressed about school? If it’s their go-to wind down, that’s not wasted time—that’s them taking care of their own stress, in a way that works for them.
The small adjustments I suggest are all low-effort, no big schedule rearrangements needed. If it’s doodling, keep a sketchbook by the desk for scheduled breaks. If it’s Lego, keep a small bin of small pieces by the homework table that they can build one quick thing with after finishing an assignment. If it’s chatting to friends about video games, set a 15 minute call break halfway through homework time instead of banning phones entirely for the night. You don’t have to prioritize the “wasteful” activity over school work, you just have to stop fighting it, because fighting it usually takes more time and energy than just scheduling it.
Javi’s mom agreed to try this approach last month. She gave him his sketchbook back, told him he can draw one page of comics after he finishes each assignment, and if he keeps his grades up, he can take the after-school art class next semester. Last week, Javi turned in his first full essay on time all semester. Lila still draws cats on any loose scrap of paper she can find when homework is done, and she still gets carried away once every week or two. I still catch myself sometimes thinking, that’s 20 minutes she could be spending reading or practicing piano. But then I remember how she comes home from school, slumps at the table, and draws three cats before she even looks at her homework, and how much easier it is for her to start after that. It doesn’t look like productive work to me, but that doesn’t mean it’s a waste. Some of the most useful stuff kids do doesn’t fit on a report card, anyway. We’re still figuring it out, one set of fractions and one cat doodle at a time.
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