Is my child’s silly repetitive hobby a waste of time? A parent and teacher’s take
Last Tuesday, I stood at the kitchen sink scraping burnt mac and cheese off a baking sheet, and counted 17 crumpled failed paper spinners in the trash can next to my 9-year-old son Leo’s chair. My sister texted 10 minutes earlier, after I sent her a photo of Leo’s table heaped in scrap construction paper and half-squeezed glue sticks: “Isn’t that a waste of his time? He could be finishing his reading log or that extra math packet his teacher sent.”
The question isn’t new. Last month, Leo’s grandma asked why I let him spend an hour after dinner rearranging his rock collection instead of practicing piano. A few weeks before that, another mom at soccer practice joked that her 8-year-old would rather dig for worms and sort acorns in the backyard than do anything “useful,” and said she just can’t let that much unplanned time slide. I get the impulse. I’m a 4th grade teacher too, so I’ve had at least a hundred parents pull me aside after parent-teacher conferences to ask: “My kid just draws dinosaurs in the margins of every worksheet. Is that a waste of time? Should I make them stop?”
Leo got the idea for his spinners from a 60-second video a classmate posted online. His goal is to make one that spins for 10 full seconds on its own. The first 12 didn’t hit more than 2 seconds. He adjusted the center hole, first making it bigger, then taping it shut and punching a new one a millimeter to the left. He tested different materials: cardstock from my printer drawer, old birthday wrapping paper, even cut up a Cheerios box to get stiffer cardstock. Last week he asked me to help him test different center weights—he taped a paperclip to one, a single grain of rice to another, a dab of hot glue to a third. That night, I sat at the table grading spelling tests while he timed each new attempt on my old phone. When one hit 7 seconds flat, he jumped up so fast he knocked over a pencil cup, ran to show his dad, and was back at the table tweaking it five minutes later.
A couple years ago, I had a 4th grader named Mia who spent every free reading period drawing cross-sections of roller coasters in her notebook. Her mom came to me convinced it was a total waste of time, that Mia should be using that time to actually read or practice her essay writing. We talked it over, and instead of making her stop, I suggested she turn her hobby into a class project. I helped her map out gravity and kinetic energy on one of her coasters, and she wrote a five-paragraph essay about what makes a roller coaster fun. She ended up entering that project in the school science fair, and won third place. More than that, for the rest of the year, she stopped complaining about writing assignments. She’d even ask if she could tie her topics back to amusement parks, because it felt like her work, not just something I assigned.
People always ask me how I tell if something’s actually a waste of time, and the first thing I tell them is to spend 5 minutes sitting with your kid and watching what they do, no interruptions. Just ask one question: “What’s the hardest part about this right now?” Nine times out of ten, what looks like mindless messing around is actually problem-solving. Leo’s trial and error with spinners is the exact same scientific method I teach in class, but he’s way more invested in getting it right than he would be if I handed him a worksheet about it.
If you’re still worried about other work piling up, try the timed trade instead of a flat ban. Instead of saying “put that away and do your homework,” say “Finish 15 minutes of piano practice, and then you can have 30 minutes of spinner time before dinner, and I’ll even help you time the new one.” It’s low effort, it doesn’t require you to take away something your kid cares about, and it avoids the biggest problem with banning: if you take their hobby away, they’ll just spend the whole time they’re supposed to be doing homework thinking about it anyway. I learned that the hard way when Leo was 7. He got obsessed with folding paper cranes, and had 200 of them stacked on his desk, all different colors. I thought it was a waste of space and time, so I tucked the whole shoebox into the back of the closet while he was at school. He cried for 20 minutes when he got home. Turns out he was making one for every kid in his class for Valentine’s Day, matching the color to each kid’s favorite color. He wasn’t just folding paper. He was planning, he was thinking about other people, and he was practicing his fine motor skills without even realizing it. I felt terrible for ever thinking it was a waste.
Of course, not all “free time” is equal. There’s a big difference between a kid actively problem-solving and tweaking their hobby, and a kid mindlessly scrolling short videos for three hours after school. I don’t let Leo scroll TikTok for hours on end, but watching a 60-second tutorial to figure out how to make a better spinner is a world away from passive scrolling.
Last night, Leo got a spinner that spun for 9.8 seconds. He cheered so loud the cat ran under the couch, took a photo, and sent it to his classmate who inspired the whole project. This morning, he was already talking about cutting a bigger spinner out of an old poster board, to see if he can get it to hit 15 seconds. I still catch myself sometimes, glancing at the pile of paper scraps on the table, thinking that this is a lot of time he could spend on something “important.” I still have nights when piano practice runs late because he wanted to test one more spinner, and we have to take the trash out twice a week just to keep up with all the failed attempts. But so far, none of this feels wasted. I don’t know if this hobby will lead to anything big, if he’ll grow up to be an engineer or a designer or anything like that. I do know that he’s learning more from spinning 17 bad paper spinners than he would from completing one extra math worksheet. That feels like enough for now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Is my child’s silly repetitive hobby a waste of time