Is my child’s constant doodling a waste of time? What I learned as a teacher mom
The damp laundry was still heaped on the couch last Tuesday when my husband nodded toward the kitchen table and whispered, “Is this thing a waste of time?” Leo, our 10-year-old, was hunched over the school journal I’d bought him at the start of the semester, supposed to be finishing a half-page of long division homework. Instead, he was filling page after page with crumpled fenders, skid marks, and two cars nose-to-nose in an intersection. Every drawing was a tiny variation of the same crash. The eraser in his hand was chewed down to a nub, and grape jelly from his after-school snack smudged the edge of his math worksheet.
My husband said he’d been sneaking this for three days, we’d reminded him a dozen times to get his work done, and all this drawing wasn’t moving anything forward. Was it just avoidance, a waste of time? I didn’t answer right away, because I immediately thought of Javi.
Javi was a fourth grader I taught five years ago, who did the exact same thing. He’d fill entire spiral notebooks with drawings of fighter jets during whole-group reading, hiding the notebook behind his textbook so I wouldn’t see. When Javi’s parents came in for fall conferences, they were upset. They’d taken all his notebooks away at home, grounded him from drawing, said he was wasting time that should be spent reading and doing homework. They asked if I should do the same at school, if we needed to test him for attention issues.
I suggested we try one small thing first. I pulled Javi aside after class and told him I’d noticed his drawings, how detailed they were, and asked how much time he needed a day to work on them. He said 10 minutes at the start of reading. We made a deal: 10 minutes of drawing before we started class, then he put the notebook away and joined the group. His parents agreed to mirror this at home: 15 minutes of drawing after dinner before homework, no sneaking. Within a month, Javi’s participation went up. I soon realized he’d been drawing the scenes from the books we were reading—fighter jets for the WWII memoir we studied, the main character’s farm when we did our nonfiction unit. By the end of the semester, his reading test scores went up 12 percentile points. A few months later, his mom told me they’d found out he’d started drawing the day they told him they were getting divorced. It was how he processed all the chaos he couldn’t put into words.
I remembered that as I stood there folding socks, and I remembered our little fender bender on the way to grandma’s was only a month ago. No one was hurt, just a cracked headlight and a tow truck, but for three days after, Leo kept asking if the crash would have happened if he hadn’t made me turn around to grab his stuffed bear he’d left on the counter. I’d told him a dozen times it wasn’t his fault, but it still hung there, I guess.
I get why we ask this question, right? As parents and teachers, we’re always checking if time is being spent well. We have homework to finish, deadlines to meet, skills to build, and a drawing of a car crash doesn’t check any of those boxes on our list. But I’ve learned that what looks like wasting time is almost always work our kids are doing that we just can’t see. It doesn’t look productive to us, but it’s productive for them.
The first thing I tell other parents who ask me this is, before you take the thing away—the doodle notebook, the fidget toy, the collection of rocks they sort for an hour every afternoon, the endless replays of that one Minecraft clip—pause for three days and just notice when they do it. What happened right before they started? Is it after a big test? A fight with a friend? A scary thing they won’t talk about? For Leo, it was always after we brought up the car crash or talked about driving somewhere new. It wasn’t just avoidance of homework, it was avoidance of the big, scary feeling he didn’t know how to talk about.
Second, give it a scheduled slot instead of banning it. Banning just makes them sneak it, which means they’re still thinking about it while they’re supposed to be doing other things, and it takes even more time away than if you just give it a specific time. We worked out a deal with Leo: 15 minutes of doodle time right after he finishes his homework every night, before dinner. If he finishes his homework early, he gets extra doodle time. He stopped sneaking it during homework, and his homework is done 10 minutes faster on average now, because he knows the doodle time is waiting for him. It didn’t fix everything, but it cut our nightly fights about homework in half.
Third, ask one specific question instead of criticizing. Instead of “why are you wasting time on that?” just ask “can you tell me about this one?” The first time I asked Leo about his crash drawings, he sat there for 10 minutes talking through why he draws it different every time—sometimes it rains, sometimes the cop gives him a lollipop, sometimes the other driver brings him a cookie. He said drawing it over and over makes it feel less scary, because he gets to decide how it ends. I’d told him a dozen times it wasn’t his fault, but drawing it was how he actually believed it.
Last week, we had a school diorama due, and Leo spent an hour drawing instead of cutting out his palm trees for the rainforest project. I stood in the doorway for a minute, ready to take the notebook, and then I just asked what he was working on. He said he was nervous he’d glue the volcano wrong, and drawing helped his hands stop shaking. I set a timer for 10 minutes, we worked on the diorama together after, and it turned out fine.
Last night I cleaned out his backpack to get ready for the week, and I found a new drawing tucked in the back. It’s the crash, but this time everyone’s fine, Leo’s in the back seat eating that lollipop from the cop, and the sun is out. It’s still not long division. It still takes time away from other things some days. I still have nights where I lie awake wondering if I’m letting him waste too much time that should be spent on more important things. But for now, the notebook stays on the kitchen table. We’ll sort out the rest next week.
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