Is my child’s unstructured play a waste of time? A teacher parent’s real experience
I’m wiping crumbs of goldfish crackers off the kitchen counter, sponge still soapy from after-school snack, when my 8-year-old Lila spreads 12 pieces of scrap printer paper across the empty space. She’s been drawing the same lopsided cat over and over for 45 minutes straight, every one wearing the same sparkly unicorn sticker I bought for her birthday last month. My partner leans in the doorway, voice low so she doesn’t hear, and asks the question I’ve thought a hundred times: “Shouldn’t we be working on her reading flashcards? Is this just a waste of time?”
As a 4th grade teacher, I’ve gotten this question from dozens of parents over the years. Last semester, Javi, one of my quietest students, spent every free minute in class folding origami dragons. He left them on my desk, tucked them into other kids’ backpacks, had a stack of them folded in his pencil box that he’d pull out the second we finished a whole-group lesson. His mom emailed me three times in a month, worried he was wasting all his free time at home too, skipping extra math practice to fold more dragons, and asked me to encourage him to stop. I told her I wouldn’t ban the dragons, but I’d keep an eye on how he was doing in class.
A week later, we were working through a geometry unit on angles and symmetry, and half the class was struggling to wrap their heads around how rotational symmetry works. Javi raised his hand before I could call on anyone else, pulled his largest dragon out of his backpack, and walked to the front of the room. He showed us how he folded the wings to match exactly, how he measured the cut for the head to get a 45-degree angle, how spinning the whole dragon on the point of its tail makes it look the same no matter how far you turn it. By the time he finished, every kid who’d been confused got it. A month later, his mom told me he’d started measuring his own paper to cut perfect square sheets, calculating how much material he’d need for a 3-foot dragon for the school fair. He was doing more math on his own than the extra worksheets she’d bought would have ever gotten him.
I didn’t always get this. When I first started teaching, I filled every minute of the school day with structured activities, because that’s what the curriculum guides told us to do—down time was lost time, after all. When Lila was little, I bought all the educational activity boxes, signed her up for back-to-back enrichment classes, and felt guilty if we had a whole afternoon with nothing planned. I thought any activity that didn’t have a clear, measurable outcome was a waste.
Now, when I feel that little twinge of worry that we’re wasting time, I follow three small, low-effort rules that I share with the parents I work with. First, wait 10 minutes before you redirect. Most of the time, what looks like mindless messing around is actually a kid practicing sustained focus on something they care about—something we’re always telling kids we want them to get better at, but we interrupt them every 10 minutes to do something “more important”. I’ve seen so many kids who struggle to focus long-term because they never get the chance to follow a silly idea all the way through before an adult pulls them away.
Second, ask one 10-second question: “What’s the coolest part of what you’re working on?” That’s it. No big lecture, no pushing them to turn it into a “real” project. Just that question, to help you see what they’re actually getting out of it. When I asked Lila that question the day of the cat drawings, she told me she was designing characters for a comic she’s making for her best friend’s birthday, where every cat has three extra tails so they can hold more ice cream cones. She’d spent 45 minutes working out how to make each cat look different enough for readers to tell them apart—problem solving, plotting, writing, all in that “wasted” 45 minutes.
Third, keep a small space set aside for these projects. We have a bottom drawer in our kitchen cabinet full of scrap paper, old cardboard tubes, leftover stickers, and broken crayons. It doesn’t take up much space, and there’s no rule that anything made there has to be kept or displayed. It’s just for messing around, no strings attached.
I still catch myself sometimes. Last weekend, Lila spent two hours rearranging her rock collection by how shiny each one is, instead of working on the art project we’d signed up for for the library’s summer challenge. I felt that old familiar twist: this is a waste. Then she came running over to me, holding a piece of notebook paper with a hand-drawn bar graph, showing how many rocks were in each of her three shine categories. She’d made it for her science fair project idea, all on her own.
I still don’t have this all figured out. Some days, we do have to cut the doodling or folding or rock sorting short to get to practice or get mandatory homework done. But more often than not, the things that look like a waste of time are just the things that don’t show up on a test score or a progress report. Last night, Lila finished her cat comic and wrapped it up in birthday wrapping paper. The spelling is messy, the lines are wobbly, and only she and her friend will ever think it’s cool. It won’t get her into college, it won’t make her into a famous artist. But it’s hers, and that’s never a waste.
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