Is My Kid’s Fidget Building A Waste Of Time? A Teacher’s Parenting Perspective
Last month I sat across from a mom at a 3rd grade parent-teacher conference, her notebook splayed open with a half-ring of coffee around the edge, and she pulled a crumpled plastic grocery bag out of her purse. Upended onto the table rolled 17 tiny red Lego bricks, three pipe cleaners twisted into lumpy snakes, a half-carved bar of pink soap, and a rubber fidget cube missing one button. “I throw these away every Sunday,” she said, nodding at her 8-year-old son, who was slouched in the next chair rolling a Pokemon card back and forth across the table. “He hides them in his backpack, in his sock drawer, even in the cereal box. I keep telling him if he’d stop messing around and focus on homework, it’d get done twice as fast. But I’m starting to wonder—am I crazy? Is this actually just a waste of time, or is there something I’m missing here?”
I’ve been teaching 4th grade for 12 years, and I have an 8-year-old son of my own, so this question hits close to home. Three months ago, I stood over his kitchen table while he did his spelling homework, his hands busy looping a thick rubber band around his fingers, twisting it into knots and pulling it apart over and over. I’d had a long day of staff meetings, the sink was full of dishes, and I snapped: “Put that down and pay attention. How are you supposed to learn anything with your hands all over that thing?” He blinked up at me, rubber band still looped around his thumb, and said, “I am paying attention. My hands just need something to do so my brain doesn’t go think about the new skate park.”
I quizzed him anyway, annoyed, and he got all 15 words right. The next day, I made him leave the rubber band on the counter while he practiced. He missed four out of 15, and kept getting up to grab a snack, sharpen his pencil, and check the mail. That’s when I started questioning my own assumption that anything that doesn’t look like focus is a waste of time.
I started paying closer attention in my own classroom after that. Last year I had a student, Mia, who brought a bag of tiny 3D printed dinosaur bones to class every day. She’d assemble a skeleton, take it apart, put it back together again the whole time we did whole-group reading. Her dad emailed me after the first month, worried it was a distraction, a waste of class time that should be spent listening. I suggested we do a two-week trial: one week no dinos, one week with. We tracked her exit ticket scores—those little 3-question checks we do at the end of reading to make sure kids got the main idea. The week without, she averaged 1.8 correct out of 3, and got up to sharpen her pencil or get a tissue seven times that week. The week with, she averaged 2.7 correct, and got up once.
I think most of us grow up with this idea that “focused” looks a certain way: sitting up straight, hands folded on the desk, eyes on the speaker. If it doesn’t look that way, we assume the brain isn’t working, that the extra activity is a waste of time. But that’s just a rule we made up for classrooms, not how brains actually work. For a lot of kids—mine, Mia, the little boy at the conference—their brain has extra energy that needs somewhere to go. If their hands don’t get that energy out, the whole brain wanders off to recess or dinosaurs or Pokemon. The tiny building or twisting isn’t taking away from learning—it’s making learning possible.
That doesn’t mean every messy, hands-side activity is useful, though. The concrete thing I tell parents to do first, instead of guessing, is run a three-day test. Pick one small, specific thing to track: how long homework takes, how many spelling words your kid gets right on the practice quiz, how many questions they can answer after you read a chapter out loud together. Do one day with the activity, one day without, and write down the numbers. Don’t go by how it looks—go by what actually happens. I’ve had so many parents tell me they were shocked when the numbers showed the fidget made homework faster, not slower.
Second, set small boundaries so it doesn’t turn into a full-blown distraction. You don’t need a bin full of expensive new fidget toys from Amazon. Keep it to a small desk caddy with 10 to 15 tiny items: spare Lego bricks, pipe cleaners, smooth river rocks, old wine corks, rubber bands. No sets with 50 pieces that will end up all over the carpet, no anything that makes noise or lights up. If you’re sending it to school, check with your kid’s teacher first—some teachers don’t allow any fidgets, some are fine with small ones, and it’s easier to work with the rule than fight it.
Third, if it’s not hurting anyone, leave it alone. I used to get embarrassed when my son pulled out his rubber band at family dinner or at the doctor’s office, when relatives would side-eye me and say “can’t you make him sit still?” But most of the time, it doesn’t bother anyone else, and it keeps him from bouncing off the walls or getting grumpy from waiting.
That mom texted me two weeks ago. She said she did the three-day test, and on the day her son had his Lego bin, homework finished 35 minutes earlier than the day without, and he missed one spelling word instead of five. She said she still thinks it looks wrong. She still catches herself wanting to scoop the whole bin into the trash when she’s cleaning up the kitchen after dinner, or when her mother-in-law comments on how he can’t sit still. She doesn’t throw them away anymore, though.
I still catch myself with my son, too. Last week we were going over his book report outline, and he was twisting that same rubber band over and over, and I almost opened my mouth to tell him to put it down. I stopped myself, though. It still doesn’t look like focus, not the way I learned it. But the test results don’t lie. Some things that look like a waste of time are just the way your kid’s brain works. And that’s not a waste. It’s just learning.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Is My Kid’s Fidget Building A Waste Of Time