Is My Kid’s Constant Doodling A Waste Of Time? What I Learned As A Mom And Teacher
Sunday afternoon, I was cleaning out my 8-year-old son Leo’s backpack after a long week of school. I pulled out crumpled Goldfish cracker crumbs, a lost tooth wrapped in tissue, a half-used glue stick, and at least 40 sticky notes, every single one covered in tiny, detailed dinosaur drawings. My husband Mike leaned against the doorframe holding a laundry basket, picked one up and turned it over. “Is this just a waste of time?” he said. “All these little notes. He spends an hour every night after homework doing this. He could be practicing multiplication facts or finishing that graphic novel he started. This just feels like… nothing.”
As a 4th grade teacher, this question isn’t new to me. Just two weeks earlier, I sat across from a mom at parent-teacher conferences who asked me the exact same thing about her son Jax, who draws skate parks in the margins of every worksheet. “He’s missing what I’m saying, right?” she said. “It’s a waste of class time. Should I make him stop?”
Twelve years ago, when I first started teaching, I would have agreed with her. I remember my first year, a 5th grader named Miles drew military airplanes in a beat-up sketchbook the entire time I did read aloud. I got fed up one day, walked over, took the sketchbook, closed it and set it on my desk. When read aloud ended, I quizzed the kids on the main character’s motivation, and Miles was the only one who got it right. After class, he came up to get his sketchbook, and he said, “I don’t mean to be rude. If my hands aren’t doing something, my brain wanders off to space. This keeps me here.”
That stuck with me. I started testing small adjustments in my classroom, and I noticed a real shift. I let kids keep a 5×7 sketch notebook on their desk, with one clear rule: doodling only during whole-group instruction, when we’re reading aloud or talking through a new concept. No doodling when they’re supposed to be writing their own essays or solving independent math problems. The number of kids getting up to sharpen pencils or fidgeting through lessons dropped by half. Most could answer my comprehension and concept questions just as well, if not better, than the kids who sat with their hands folded staring at the whiteboard.
Back home, I started watching Leo closer to see what his doodling was really doing. When he comes home from school stressed—he got a bad spelling quiz grade, fought with his best friend at recess, messed up his turn in soccer practice—he doesn’t come talk to me about it right away. He goes straight to the kitchen junk drawer, grabs a stack of sticky notes, and starts drawing. One day after a particularly tough day, when a group of kids teased him for bringing dinosaur crackers for lunch, he drew a 10-panel comic where the main T-Rex stood up to a bigger dinosaur that kept stealing everyone’s food. That’s when I realized this wasn’t mindless scribbling. It was his way of working through stuff he didn’t have words for yet.
I don’t tell parents or other caregivers to just let their kids doodle anywhere, anytime, that all unstructured drawing is automatically good. There are small, realistic adjustments that work for everyone, that I’ve picked up from both classroom and home experience. First, set clear boundaries that work for your house or classroom. If your kid is sneaking doodles during homework time and rushing through their math problems to get back to drawing, agree that all doodling happens after homework is finished. It doesn’t mean you have to take it away entirely, just give it a clear time and place. Second, keep it contained so it doesn’t become a nuisance. Instead of letting them use up all your good sticky notes or printer paper, keep a $2 sketchbook by their desk. It cuts down on mess and means you don’t have to run out for more paper every week. Third, ask one small question about their doodles once a day. It doesn’t have to be a long talk. Just “what’s the coolest thing you drew today?” It takes 30 seconds, and it lets you see what’s going on in their head, while telling them their hobby matters even if it doesn’t look “productive” to you.
A couple of weeks ago, Leo had his standardized state math test. He always finishes early, 10 or 15 minutes ahead of most other kids, and he pulled a sticky note out of his pocket to draw while he waited. The proctor told him it was against the rules, took the note, and gave him a warning. He came home upset that night, and I talked to the test coordinator the next day. We worked out a small agreement: he can keep a single blank piece of paper on his desk for when he finishes early, so he can doodle instead of getting up and distracting other kids. It’s worked so far.
I still have moments where I wonder if Mike is right. Last week I vacuumed the living room and pulled 12 crumpled half-drawn dinosaur sticky notes out from under the couch. I stood there holding them, thinking about how we could use that 10 minutes a night to practice for the upcoming district test, or learn a few beginner Spanish words. But then I remembered last month, I got to work, opened my lunch bag, and found a sticky note with a dinosaur that had my hair, holding a coffee cup, that said “best mom ever.”
Mike still teases us about it, says we’re hoarding sticky notes that could be used for grocery lists. I don’t know if all these hours of drawing dinosaurs will pay off in some big, measurable way later. Leo might not grow up to be an artist, and he’ll probably forget all these little doodles in a few years. Right now, though, it’s helping him stay calm during long tests, work through his bad days, and leave little surprises for me in my lunch. It doesn’t show up on a test score or a report card, but that doesn’t make it a waste. Some days, the things that look like time wasted are just the things we can’t measure yet.
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