Is My Kid’s Constant Doodling A Waste Of Time? What I Learned As A Teacher Mom
Last month, I was folding a pile of stinky soccer uniforms, my half-cold coffee sitting on the counter, while my 8-year-old sat at the kitchen table supposed to be finishing his 20 minutes of independent reading for homework. Ten minutes in, I glanced over, and the graphic novel he’d picked out was face-down, open to the middle, and he was filling the entire back of his blue homework folder with page after page of stick figure dragons breathing fire at each other. I sighed, the same little knot I get in my stomach tightening. I’m a 4th grade teacher, for god’s sake, I should know better, but that voice in my head was already yelling: This is a waste of time. He’s supposed to be reading. What if he falls behind?
Two days later, I sat across from his 2nd grade teacher at fall conferences, and she pulled out his dog-eared math workbook to show me his progress. Sure enough, every margin, every bit of blank space at the end of a lesson, was covered in the same dragons, race cars, and little stick-figure versions of our golden retriever, Max. “He’s such a thoughtful, smart kid,” she said, and I could hear the unspoken question hanging between us: what do we do about all this doodling? Is it pulling him away from the work he’s supposed to be doing?
On the walk home, my son skipped 20 feet ahead chasing a squirrel that had darted across the sidewalk, crumpling a leftover cookie wrapper in his hand. I stared at the back of his hoodie and turned my own question over: Is this just a waste of time that’s holding him back? I’ve spent enough time in classrooms to know I’m not the only parent asking this kind of question, about all kinds of things: endless Lego builds instead of flashcards, hours of making friendship bracelets instead of practicing reading, running around the yard chasing each other instead of finishing a craft project for school. Any time a kid picks something they love over the assigned, graded work, we start wondering if it’s just wasted time.
That night, I was grading my own 4th graders’ narrative writing papers after my son went to bed, and I stopped at Mia’s. Mia’s a quiet kid who struggles with getting her thoughts down on paper, and most weeks she turns in half-finished pieces that leave me guessing what she wanted to say. This week, she turned in a full two-page story about a girl who finds a hurt fox in the woods behind her house, and every inch of blank space around the text was covered in doodles: the fox with a torn ear, the oak tree the girl hides under, the cookies they share on the porch. I’d always let my kids doodle if they wanted, as long as they got their work done, but I’d never really stopped to think about why it mattered so much to them. Then I remembered a casual training I’d gone to a couple years back, where a speech pathologist talked about working memory: for a lot of kids, their hands need something small, low-stakes to do while their brain works through the hard, heavy stuff of learning. If their hands are still, their brain wanders off entirely. Doodling keeps it anchored.
I decided to stop assuming and start watching, for a week. One night, I sat with my son while he did his spelling homework. He pulled out his list, and immediately grabbed a pencil to start a dragon in the corner of his paper while he sounded out each word. I didn’t say anything, like I usually would. When he finished writing all 15 words, I quizzed him, and he got 14 out of 15 right—one more than he got the week before, when I’d made him put the pencil away and focus only on spelling. Another night, I read a chapter of our shared bedtime book out loud, and he sat on the floor building tiny Lego minifigures the whole time. I used to stop and tell him to pay attention, but this time I just kept reading. Halfway through, I stopped and asked him what the main character had just promised her dad. He repeated the whole line, word for word, and then told me he thought she was going to break the promise. He’d been paying attention the whole time.
I made three small changes that didn’t take any extra time or money, and they’ve worked pretty well so far. First, I gave him a dedicated clipboard with blank paper he can keep next to his homework, so he can doodle all he wants without covering his actual worksheets or workbook pages. That solved the teacher’s problem with messy workbooks, and it means he always has space to draw when he needs it. Second, if it actually becomes a distraction—like when he’s taking a timed test and he’s so focused on drawing he forgets to finish the questions—we have a simple agreement: he tucks his doodle paper in his desk, and gets it back as soon as the test is over. No arguments, no punishments, just a clear boundary. Third, I ask him what he’s drawing once a day, instead of just telling him to stop. Half the time, those random dragons are part of a whole 10-chapter story he’s making up in his head, with villains and secret tunnels and happy endings. That’s writing practice, just in pictures instead of sentences.
I still have days where it feels like a waste. Last week, we had an hour before soccer practice, and instead of practicing his piano for his upcoming recital, he spent the whole hour drawing a 6-page comic about our town’s soccer league. I stood in the doorway staring for a minute, frustrated that we’d wasted the only free time we had that day. But then he called me over to read it, and I saw all the silly dialogue he’d written, the way he’d drawn every kid on his team with their correct jersey number, even the little joke he added about our coach loving orange slices. It wasn’t piano practice, but I can’t call it a waste.
Last night, I walked past the kitchen table after cleaning up dinner, and there was his half-finished reading homework, and a 3-foot long drawing of a dragon castle taped to the wall under it. I still get that little knot sometimes, that push to fill every minute with something that “counts.” I still remind him to get back to his assigned work when it’s time to turn something in. But I don’t take the pencil away as a first step anymore. Some days the doodles turn into something he’s proud of, some days they just are. And that’s okay. It’s not a waste of time. It’s just how his brain works. I’m still learning that not everything has to have a clear outcome to matter.
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