Is My Kid’s Unstructured After-School Hobby a Waste of Time? What I Learned From Cartooning Club
The rain was coming down so hard last Tuesday I could barely see the rec center entrance through my windshield, and I was already mentally running the math. Ninety minutes of cartooning club, plus 20 minutes of drive time round trip, added up to nearly two hours a week my 10-year-old Milo wasn’t spending drilling multiplication facts or finishing his reading log. The crumpled, coffee-stained math worksheet he’d forgotten to turn in that week peeked out of his backpack on the passenger seat, and I had the same thought I’d had at least once a week since September: Is this whole thing a waste of time?
He’d begged to sign up back in August, after we’d cycled through a string of activities that checked all the “enrichment” boxes. He spent most soccer games picking dandelions on the bench. Cried after every piano lesson when his teacher corrected his hand position. Dragged his feet so hard to district math tutoring we left 15 minutes late every single week. Cartooning was $45 for an 8-week session, held in a cinder-block room off the gym that always smelled like chlorine from the pool down the hall and microwave popcorn from the front desk. The instructor was a 20-year-old illustration student who wore paint-splattered hoodies and never sent home progress reports. I said yes mostly just to say yes to something he’d asked for, no agenda attached.
Three months in, I had nothing to show for it. Every week I’d ask what he made, he’d shrug, mumble something about Garfield, and kick a rock on the way to the car. No finished comics came home, no certificates, no photos of projects posted to the parent group. Meanwhile, my social media feed was full of classmates’ robotics trophies, reading challenge medals, clips of piano recitals. I’d read the same parenting articles everyone else read: kids’ out-of-school time is supposed to build measurable skills, look good on middle school applications, give you something tangible to point to as progress. This didn’t check any of those boxes.
That rainy Tuesday, I headed in 10 minutes early because the parking lot was flooding and I didn’t want to stand outside getting soaked. The art room door was propped open with a stack of old textbooks, and I hung back by the water fountain, not wanting to interrupt. That’s when I saw him. He was leaned over a folding table with three other kids, all hovering over one beat-up spiral notebook, eraser crumbs dusting the tabletop.
“You can’t give him a jetpack,” the girl next to him said, stabbing a finger at a lopsided raccoon half-drawn on the page. “He’s afraid of heights, you said that last week.”
“That’s the joke,” Milo said, grabbing the pencil to add a little jet pack that looked more like a toaster. “He’s a mail carrier. His boss made him get it. He doesn’t have a choice.”
The quiet kid on the end spoke up around a lollipop: “Give him a parachute made out of a grocery bag. My grandma uses those for dog poop, but it works.”
All four snort-laughed so hard the kid dropped his lollipop on the floor. The instructor looked over from where he was helping a fifth kid draw a unicorn cat, grinned, and went back to what he was doing. No correction, no reminder to stay on task, no grade to mark how “good” the joke was. I glanced down at the open notebook and saw every page was half-full: crossed-out punchlines, lopsided animal hands, half-drawn tree backgrounds, sticky notes with dumb one-liners scribbled on them. Nothing was finished. Nothing was meant to be hung up or sent home. That’s why I’d never seen any of it.
When we got in the car, I skipped my usual “what did you make today” and asked about the mail raccoon instead. He lit up, talked the whole 20-minute drive home: the raccoon crashes into a bird feeder, quits his mail route, opens a cookie bakery for forest animals, the bakery gets robbed by a squirrel who steals all the chocolate chips. When I asked why he never brought drawings home to show me, he picked at a loose thread on his hoodie and said, “None of them are done. I mess up hands every time. They’re not good enough to show anyone.”
That line stuck with me through dinner, through the 20 minutes of multiplication we did after, through loading the dishwasher. I thought about when I was his age, how I spent every Saturday afternoon at my best friend’s house writing terrible detective stories and recording mix tapes off the radio. None of it was ever turned in for a grade, none won an award, most got thrown away when we cleaned out her closet before high school. For years I would have called that wasted time, if you’d asked me to list what I got out of my childhood activities. But that’s where I learned to bounce a bad idea off someone and not die of embarrassment when it flopped. That’s where I learned to cross out a bad line and write a new one instead of crumpling the whole paper up and quitting.
A week later, his classroom teacher emailed me out of the blue, unprompted. She said at the start of the year, if Milo messed up a writing prompt or got a math problem wrong halfway through, he’d crumple his paper and refuse to work for the rest of the period. In the last month, she said, he’d started just crossing out his mistakes and writing a new version in the margin. He’d even started adding little dumb side jokes to his personal narrative assignments that made the whole table laugh. I didn’t connect it to cartooning right away, but of course that’s where it came from. Every single week, he draws 10 bad sets of raccoon hands, crosses them out, tries again. No one gives him a grade, no one tells him he’s bad at it, he just gets to mess up until it works.
I didn’t have some big parenting epiphany or overhaul our whole schedule. I just changed two small things. First, I stopped asking “what did you make today” when I picked him up. I started asking “what’s the dumbest idea your group came up with this week.” It sounds tiny, but that question doesn’t demand a finished product as proof the time was worth it. He never shrugs anymore; he talks my ear off the whole drive. Second, I dug a cheap plastic bin out of the basement and set it by the front door, told him any half-drawn drawing, weird craft, or painted rock can go in there, no requirement to show anyone, no requirement to ever finish it. I don’t dig through it unless he pulls something out to show me.
It’s not like every minute of cartooning club suddenly feels like a genius investment. Some weeks he tells me they spent 25 minutes just arguing about whether Garfield would actually like lasagna that much, no drawing at all. Last month, after he forgot his math workbook for the second week in a row and we had to cram 30 minutes of facts in after bedtime, I snapped and said maybe we should skip the next session to catch up. He got quiet, picked at his pasta, and said, “That’s the only place I don’t have to get it right the first time.” I backed off. Instead of cutting club, we just moved 10 minutes of multiplication practice to every weeknight after dinner, instead of trying to cram it all in on Tuesdays. It’s slower, but we don’t fight about it anymore.
Two weeks ago, he showed up to the car with his beat-up sketchbook clutched to his chest, and handed me three finished pages of the mail raccoon story. The hands were still lopsided, the jetpack still looked like a toaster, the big punchline was “First class mail gets first class panic.” It was dumb. It was great. He taped it to the fridge himself before I even said anything, and went off to play video games. They started a new story last week, something about a penguin who runs a laundromat for squirrels, and he hasn’t brought a single page of that home yet.
If you’re currently side-eyeing some low-stakes, no-award activity your kid begs to attend, you don’t have to make a big call one way or the other. Next pickup, show up 10 minutes early and hang back where they can’t see you. Watch what they actually do when no grown-up is making them perform progress. If they’re leaning in, laughing, arguing about raccoon jetpacks, that’s not nothing. Swap your usual output-focused question for one about the silliest mistake or dumbest idea, and you might be surprised what you hear. If the activity is throwing off homework or chore schedules, shift those tasks around before you cut the thing that feels unproductive.
I still catch myself wondering sometimes. I still scroll the parent group and see all the kids moving up a grade in math and winning competition trophies and think, am I letting him waste time he could be using to get ahead? I don’t know if he’ll ever be a professional cartoonist. I don’t even know if he’ll sign up again when the new session starts in January. The penguin comic might never get finished. He still mixes up 7 times 8 half the time. But for now, it doesn’t feel like a waste. Most weeks, anyway.
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