Is my kid’s constant doodling and drawing a waste of time? A teacher explains what I learned
The kitchen table was sticky with half-eaten Goldfish crackers and a leaky apple juice box when I found the doodle. My 8-year-old nephew Jax was supposed to be working through 20 multiplication problems for homework, but instead of filling the answer grid, the entire back page of his notebook was covered in tiny, overlapping dragons. Each one had different spike details on its back, little paper crowns drawn in pencil, even a couple holding tiny lollipops colored in with red crayon. I leaned in, tapped the blank answer spaces with my pen. “You’ve got three problems done, bud. That’s a lot of dragons for homework time.” He shrugged, erasing a dragon’s wobbly wing to add another sharp scale. “They just came. I can do the math after.”
I’m a 4th grade teacher, so I’ve heard this question a hundred times from parents, and I’ve thought it myself a hundred more: Is this thing a waste of time? Jax’s mom, my sister Lila, walked in right then, wiped flour off her jeans from the cookies she was baking, and sighed. “See? That’s what I’m talking about. He draws during dinner, in the car, even on the bench during soccer practice. I keep telling him he should be reading or doing flash cards or something that matters. It feels like such a waste of time.”
I thought immediately of Mia, one of my students from last year. She drew on every margin of every worksheet, even the bubble sheets for standardized tests. Her parents pulled me aside after fall parent-teacher conferences, voices tight with worry: she’s a full grade level behind in reading comprehension, is all this drawing the problem? Should we ask the aide to take her sketchbook away during class? I told them I’d noticed the same doodling, but I didn’t think it was the distraction they thought it was. I asked them to try a small experiment for a month before we made any big changes.
What I noticed with Mia was that she didn’t doodle when she was bored, not really. When I read the class a chapter aloud from our read-aloud, she’d be drawing the main character as I described her, adding the scar on her cheek and the scuffed boots I’d mentioned. When we did group work, she’d doodle little shapes in the margin while the other kids talked, but when it was her turn to chime in, she’d already put the connections together that no one else had. Her hand being busy kept her brain from wandering, not the other way around.
We agreed that she could keep her sketchbook open on her desk during whole-class lessons, as long she joined the discussion at least once every day. At home, her parents stopped nagging her to put the drawing away during family read-aloud time, and carved out 15 minutes of unstructured doodle time after homework every night, no requirements to make it “good” or turn it into an art project. Three months later, Mia’s reading comprehension score went up 16 percentage points, enough to put her almost at grade level. She even turned in a 12-panel comic about the rock cycle for her science project that explained every step more clearly than most of the written essays I got that semester.
I told Lila all this while Jax added another dragon to the page. She crossed her arms and said, “Okay, but that’s Mia. Jax is drawing dragons while he’s supposed to be doing multiplication. Dragons aren’t going to help him pass his times tables test.” I didn’t argue. I just gave her three small, no-fuss things to try, the same things I tell parents when they ask me this question. First, keep a small half-sheet of scrap paper on the edge of the table during homework. He can doodle all he wants there, no drawing on the homework page, so it doesn’t turn into a big distraction when it’s time to turn the work in. Second, keep that 15 minutes of unplanned doodle time every day, no strings attached. No art lessons, no asking him to draw something specific, just let him draw whatever pops into his head. Third, once a week, just ask him to tell you about one drawing. That’s it, no praise or criticism, just listen.
I’ve been teaching for 12 years, and the biggest shift I’ve had is letting go of the idea that any time not spent checking a box is wasted time. As adults, we plan our days around to-do lists, we measure how useful something is by whether it moves us toward a goal we can see. But kids’ brains work differently. They process information, work through stress, and connect new ideas to old ones when their hands are busy with something that feels pointless to us. A month after Jax started this routine, I got a text from Lila. He’d had a bad day at school, got sent to the principal’s office for talking during assembly, and when he got home he drew a two-page comic about the whole thing, even drew the principal with a funny mustache that made him laugh. Lila wrote, I sat and listened to him tell me the whole story for 10 minutes, and I never would have known how embarrassed he was if he hadn’t drawn it. That’s when I started to get it.
I’m not saying doodling is never a problem. If a kid is drawing the entire class period and never turns in any work, or can’t hold a conversation without scribbling the whole time, that’s a sign something else is going on, and it’s worth checking in. But 9 times out of 10, the thing that looks like a waste of time is just work we can’t see yet.
It’s been two months since Lila tried those small changes. Jax still draws more dragons than anyone can count. He still finishes his homework five or 10 minutes later than he would if he wasn’t doodling between problems. But his last multiplication quiz was his highest score all semester, and his science teacher put that water cycle comic he drew up on the classroom bulletin board. Lila still sometimes glances over his shoulder while he’s drawing and wonders, a little, if all that pen time could be spent on something more “important.” I still sometimes catch myself telling my 4th graders to put their pens down when I’m giving directions, even though I know better. We’re all raised to think time well spent is time that checks a box. But lately, when I see a page full of tiny dragons or messy margin doodles, I don’t see a waste of time anymore. I see a kid’s brain working, one line at a time. Some things don’t show up on a grading rubric, or a report card, right away. That doesn’t make them a waste.
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