Is My Kid’s Constant Doodling a Waste of Time? A Teacher and Mom Shares What I’ve Learned
Last month, I sat across from Lila’s 4th grade math teacher at her parent-teacher conference, watching her flip through my daughter’s math notebook. Every page of notes was bordered, wrapped, and sometimes almost covered in tiny doodles: cats in top hats, daisies with smiley faces, little swirls that wrapped around every equation. Ms. Henderson paused, tapped one of the cats with her pen, and said what so many of us have thought when we see a kid’s work covered in extra marks: “I just can’t help wondering if all this is a waste of time. Shouldn’t she be focusing on the lesson instead of drawing?”
I nodded, because I’d had that exact thought myself a hundred times. I’m a 2nd grade teacher, and for years I’ve stopped kids mid-doodle to redirect them back to the work. As a mom, I’ve crumpled up receipt after receipt covered in Lila’s drawings and wondered if all that time adding tiny details to cat whiskers could be spent doing something more “useful.”
We left the conference, and I herded Lila and her 7-year-old brother into our minivan, which still smells like the spilled apple juice from that morning and has goldfish crumbs wedged in the cup holder. We had 20 minutes to kill before soccer practice, so I pulled into the grocery store parking lot, and when I turned around to ask Lila what she thought about what her teacher said, she didn’t even look up. She was drawing a whole family of cats on the back of my grocery receipt, her tongue stuck out a little at the corner of her mouth.
“I’m listening,” she said, when I repeated the question. “I doodle when I listen. It doesn’t take away from the math. The cats just keep my hands busy so my brain can do the work.”
That line hit me, because I remembered Javi, a kid I had in my 2nd grade class two years ago. Javi drew detailed football plays on every single worksheet we had. Every spelling list, every reading response, every math problem—next to it was a little diagram of a play, with Xs and Os and a tiny quarterback in the end zone. For the first two months of school, I kept telling him to put his pencil down, stop drawing, focus on the work. I’d even take his paper away and give him a new one once, because he’d drawn over half the reading questions.
Then one week we had a spelling test on 15 really tricky words with silent letters. Javi got 15 out of 15. When I handed his test back, I flipped it over and saw he’d drawn a whole 3-play drive on the back. I started paying closer attention after that. When Javi was allowed to doodle, he turned in his work on time, got similar scores to the rest of the class, and participated in group discussions just as much as any other kid. When I made him stop, he’d fidget at his desk, tap his pencil on the table so loud the whole table turned, and forget what we were talking about mid-sentence.
That’s the thing I think a lot of us get wrong: we assume any activity that isn’t the exact thing we’re supposed to be doing is a waste of time. If a kid isn’t staring directly at the teacher or writing only lesson notes during class, that time is wasted. But over the years, both in my classroom and at my kitchen table doing homework, I’ve learned that for a lot of kids, that extra little activity is what lets them focus on the main thing.
It’s not that hard to test this, actually, which is the first thing I tell other parents who ask me about doodling. Try this: for two weeks, just keep track of how much work your kid actually gets done, what their test scores are, how much they participate when they’re allowed to doodle. If their work is just as good as it would be otherwise, it’s not a waste of time. It’s just their strategy.
If the doodling is actually getting in the way—like if they’re drawing over all the questions so they can’t read them, or they’re so busy drawing they forget to turn in their work—you don’t have to ban it entirely. Just add a dedicated doodle zone. I suggested this to Ms. Henderson for Lila: we just drew a thick line down the right margin of every page in her math notebook, and told Lila all her doodles have to stay in that space. That’s it. It took two minutes to do, Lila didn’t complain, and after a month Ms. Henderson said it’s working great. She can still see all the equations, Lila still gets to draw her cats, and everyone’s happy. For kids doing homework at home, you can just keep a small 3×5 sketchbook open on the desk next to their worksheet, and tell them any doodles go there. That works too, no extra supplies or big changes needed.
The most concrete step, actually, is just to ask your kid. Most of the time they can tell you exactly why they’re doing it. I’ve had kids tell me it keeps their wiggly hands busy so their brain doesn’t get bored. I’ve had kids say it helps them remember what the teacher said, because they associate the drawing with the lesson. Lila told me that when the teacher is talking about long division, which is really boring, drawing cats makes the boring parts okay so she can stick with it until she gets it.
Last week, I was sitting in a 2-hour staff meeting for work, and halfway through I caught myself drawing little coffee mugs in the margin of my meeting notes. I’ve been doing that since I was in college, sitting through long lectures. It never once occurred to me that my doodling was a waste of my own time. It’s just what I do to stay focused. So why would I think any differently of a kid?
The other day Lila brought home her latest math test. She got an A, and tucked in the right margin, next to the last problem, was a tiny cat wearing a graduation cap. Ms. Henderson even drew a little smiley face next to it. We still have days where Lila gets carried away and draws over half the page, and we have to erase a little to turn the assignment in. It’s not a perfect system, and I still catch myself worrying sometimes that she’s missing something. But I’ve stopped asking if it’s a waste of time. Now I just ask if it’s working. So far, it is.
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