Is My Kid’s Repetitive Play a Waste of Time? What I Learned As a Mom and Preschool Teacher
I was folding a pile of mismatched socks last Tuesday afternoon when my neighbor Sarah popped through the back gate to drop off a jar of pickles. My 4-year-old son Leo was spread out on the kitchen floor, surrounded by the dented plastic measuring cups I keep under the sink for baking. He’d stacked 10 of them, biggest to smallest, knocked the whole tower over with his dinosaur socked foot, and was already starting over. He’d been at it for 25 minutes.
Sarah leaned against the doorframe, sipping the iced tea I’d poured her, and laughed. “Gosh, isn’t that a waste of time?” she said. “Aren’t you guys working on letters or that new 100-piece puzzle you got him for his birthday? My Jax does one of those workbooks every night before bed now, he can spell his whole name.”
I smiled and nodded, but that little familiar twinge of doubt pinched my chest. I’ve been a preschool teacher for 8 years, so I should’ve had an answer ready. But I catch myself asking the same question all the time: Is this thing he’s doing actually a waste of time?
Last month at school, I watched a 3-year-old new student spend the entire 45-minute center period moving a single pinecone back and forth between the sensory bin and the block bin. Back, forth, back, forth. My recess aide pulled me aside halfway through, quiet so the kid wouldn’t hear. “Should we redirect her? Get her to play with the other kids? This feels like nothing.”
I get it. When every parenting article online tells us early learning is all about enriching activities, when our mom groups are full of checklists of what your kid should know by age 4, any activity that doesn’t result in a drawing, a new word, or a mastered skill feels like time we can’t get back. I’ve felt it too, staring at Leo sorting the same buttons into piles for the third day in a row, thinking we could be practicing counting or reading board books instead.
But then I remember the milk. Three months before Sarah’s visit, Leo couldn’t pour his own milk without spilling half of it all over the table. I’d tried practicing with him, I bought that little kid-sized sippy pitcher with the spout, I stood over him reminding him to slow down, and every time it ended with a towel on the floor and me frustrated. Then, a week after that Tuesday stacking session, I turned around to get cereal and he’d grabbed the pitcher, lifted it slow, and poured a perfect glass of milk, not a drop spilled.
I thought about those 25 minutes stacking measuring cups. Every time he set a cup on top of the stack, he was adjusting his grip, testing how much pressure he could use before the whole thing fell, figuring out how to move slow when he wanted to go fast. That’s exactly the fine motor control he needed to pour that milk. The practice I was trying to force didn’t work. The play everyone calls a waste of time did.
With the pinecone kid, it was the same thing. We left her be, no redirection, just checked in once in a while to let her know we were there. A week went by of the same back and forth. Then she added a rock to the trip. Then she started stopping to look at what the other kids were building. By the third week, she left the pinecone on the shelf and asked to join a group building a block road. If we’d pulled her away, told her that moving a pinecone was a waste of time, she never would’ve gotten comfortable enough to join in. That repetitive, boring-looking play was her way of learning her new space, learning to feel safe, before she took the next step.
I’ve picked up a few small, concrete things I do now when I start wondering if what my kid or my students are doing is a waste of time. First, I stop and ask two quick questions: Is anyone getting hurt? Is this keeping anyone else from what they need to do? If the answer to both is no, I step back for 5 minutes and just watch, instead of jumping to redirect. Nine times out of 10, I can see what they’re working on that I missed at first glance.
Second, if I do need to end the activity—like I need the measuring cups for dinner, or it’s time to leave for school—I don’t just clear it away. I name what they did first, then offer a way to come back to it. Instead of “come on, we have to go, knock this down,” I say “You stacked 10 cups today, that’s three more than yesterday! Let’s take a picture of your tower so we can build it again after dinner.” It takes 10 extra seconds, and it honors that what they were doing mattered, even if it didn’t look like learning to anyone else.
I still have bad days. Last weekend, I was in a hurry to get out the door for a birthday party, and Leo was sorting his toy silverware by size for the third time that week, and I rushed him, cleared the whole tray into the drawer before he was done. He cried, and I felt terrible the whole party. It’s hard to unlearn the idea that “productive” means something that looks like work to adults.
A couple weeks ago, I saw Sarah through her kitchen window, leaning against the counter while her son stacked canned beans into a tower on the floor. She waved when she saw me, no rush to knock it down.
These days, when someone asks me if that thing a kid’s doing is a waste of time, I just tell them what I’ve seen. More often than not, it’s not a waste. It’s just kid work, happening at a kid’s pace, that doesn’t look like the work we’re used to. I still leave the measuring cups under the sink, and I still stop folding laundry for a minute to watch Leo stack and knock down, stack and knock down. It doesn’t look like much from the doorframe. But it’s enough.
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