Is My Child’s Quiet Hobby a Waste of Time? Parenting Tips From a Former Teacher
I was sipping lukewarm coffee in the school library last month, sitting across from my 8-year-old son Leo’s 2nd grade teacher, when she leaned forward and asked, “He spends 15 minutes every free period folding paper into little cranes. Is this something you’d encourage, or do you think it’s a waste of time?”
I froze for a second. Just three days earlier, my mom had asked me the exact same question, over a plate of chocolate chip cookies at Sunday dinner. She’d watched Leo skip the extra math worksheets I’d printed to keep his skills sharp over the weekend, pull out a stack of neon origami paper, and fold for 20 minutes straight. “All those little cranes just pile up, right?” she’d said. “What’s the point of it?”
I get it. I spent 7 years teaching first grade before I had kids, and I heard this question all the time from parents. Is reading comic books during independent reading a waste of time? Is building LEGOs instead of doing the extra credit word search a waste of time? Is doodling all over the margins of math worksheets a waste of time? We’re all wired to measure a kid’s time by what it produces: a better test score, a new skill, a finished project that looks good on a fridge. If it doesn’t check one of those boxes, the default assumption is that it’s wasted.
Three Tuesdays ago, I saw exactly what Leo got out of his cranes. He came home red-eyed, his sneakers scuffed from rolling around on the blacktop after a fight with his best friend over who got to be quarterback at recess. He dumped his backpack by the door, grabbed the origami paper I keep in the junk drawer next to the rubber bands and extra batteries, and sat at the kitchen table without saying a word. Twenty minutes later, he pushed a slightly lopsided pink crane across the table to me and said, “I still feel mad, but I don’t want to punch the couch anymore.”
Leo has ADHD, and for him, switching from the loud, overstimulating chaos of a school day to focused homework time has always been a battle. Before he got into origami, he’d come home, grab his tablet, and spiral into overstimulation that would make homework take an hour longer than it needed to. Now, he knows he gets 15 minutes of folding time right after we walk in the door before we start homework. Over the past two months, I’ve noticed his homework time is 10 minutes shorter on average, and he has way fewer meltdowns halfway through. That’s not nothing.
As a former teacher, I’ve learned the hard way that “wasting time” is rarely just wasting time. I once had a 1st grader who drew tiny dinosaurs on every spare piece of paper he could find. His parents were convinced it was distracting him from reading, kept asking me to make him stop. We tried it for a week: no drawing during class. His fidgeting got worse, he read fewer pages, he got sent to the office twice for talking. Instead of banning it, we worked out a new rule: he could draw one dinosaur after he finished each reading assignment. By the end of the semester, he was reading three chapter books a week above his grade level, and he even wrote and illustrated his own 12-page dinosaur book for the class author fair.
The practical stuff I’ve landed on, after years of teaching and parenting, is pretty simple. It’s not fancy, but it works. When you’re staring at your kid folding paper, or drawing dinosaurs, or rearranging their rock collection for the third time that week and wondering if it’s a waste, try this first: write down three 1-sentence observations over three days. No judgment, just facts. For me, that looked like: 1) Leo folds cranes when he’s upset and it calms him down. 2) He can focus on folding for 20 minutes straight, which is longer than he focuses on any other activity. 3) He talks about his cranes with his friends and teaches them how to fold, which gets him talking to kids he doesn’t usually play with. That’s way more useful than jumping to a conclusion right away.
If the activity isn’t hurting anything—if it’s not keeping them from finishing homework, not making them miss bedtime, not hurting anyone else—carve out a set small window for it instead of banning it. For Leo, that’s 15 minutes after school and 10 minutes on Sunday afternoon. He knows it’s coming, so he doesn’t feel the need to sneak it during class or hide it from relatives. If it is starting to crowd out other things, adjust the window, don’t eliminate it. I’ve had other parents tell me their kid doodles all through math class, so they agree to 10 minutes of doodling before school to get it out of their system, and check in with the teacher about a 1-minute doodle break when they feel wiggly. It works way better than taking the notebook away.
Leo’s teacher ended up putting a small jar of origami paper by the class reading corner, and now three other kids fold cranes during free period too. Last week, Leo brought home a paper crane chain the whole class made for the school secretary who was out sick with COVID.
I still have moments where I wonder. Last week, we were supposed to be working on his science fair project, and he stopped to fold a crane out of our graph paper, and I almost snapped and told him to stop wasting our time. I caught myself, and two minutes later he was done, and back to gluing his volcano together. Some days, I open the junk drawer and see a pile of 40 little cranes, all different colors, and I think maybe this is just taking up space. But then I remember the pink crane he gave me when he was mad, the chain for the secretary, the way he walks out of school calmer and ready for the rest of the day. It’s not a resume builder, it’s not going to get him into college. But a lot of the good stuff in childhood isn’t. Right now, that’s good enough for me.
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