Is My Kid’s Repetitive Play a Waste of Time? What Parents Should Know
Last Saturday, I was folding fitted sheets on the couch when my sister dropped by with coffee. Leo, my 7-year-old, was sprawled on the floor by the coffee table, and had been for 45 minutes, arranging and rearranging his collection of 32 matchbox cars into a straight parking lot. My sister set the coffee down, nodded at him, and lowered her voice like she was letting me in on a secret: “Isn’t that a waste of time? You got him that new graphic novel last week, why isn’t he reading that instead of just lining up cars?”
That question gets thrown around a lot, both as a parent and as a part-time pre-K assistant, I hear it all the time. A mom pulled me aside after drop-off last month, worried her 4-year-old spends every afternoon digging the same hole in the backyard instead of practicing writing his name. Another dad asked me last year if he should stop his 5-year-old from stacking and unstacking the same set of plastic cups after dinner, because it “wasn’t teaching him anything.”
I’ve been there. When Leo was 4, I used to keep a running mental list of “productive” activities he should be doing, and got anxious when he circled back to the same car game day after day. Once I even cleared the table mid-arrangement, put all the cars in the bin, and pulled out a counting workbook I’d bought on sale. Leo cried for 20 minutes, and I spent the rest of the evening feeling like I’d ruined his favorite thing for no good reason.
After that, I started stopping and watching before I interrupted. What I found surprised me. The game isn’t the same every time, even when it looks like it. One week he sorts by color. The next, by size. Last month he spent three days adjusting the parking lot so it fit exactly along the edge of the table, no overhang, no gaps. He tested 12 different configurations before he got it right, never getting frustrated, just moving one car, stepping back, and trying again. That’s problem solving. That’s focus. I can’t get him to focus that hard on a workbook I hand him, ever.
The first thing I tell other parents who ask me if their kid’s routine is a waste is to set a 10-minute timer before you step in to redirect. Most of the time we call something useless before we actually see what’s happening. The mom with the digging kid tried this after we talked. She went outside, sat on the porch, and didn’t say anything for 10 minutes. She realized her son was testing how much water the hole would hold before it leaked into the dirt below, counting scoops of dirt with an old yogurt cup, and marking the water level with a stick every time it rained. She’d never noticed because she’d been telling him to come inside and practice writing after 2 minutes of digging.
The second small adjustment I suggest is how you talk about the activity when you do need to end it for dinner, errands, or homework. Instead of saying “put that stupid stuff away, we have to go,” try “We need to leave in five minutes – let’s mark your spot so you can get back to it tomorrow.” For us, that means leaving the parking lot set up on the back table, even if it means eating dinner on the couch one night. It’s a tiny shift, and it means he doesn’t feel like the thing he cares about is a waste of anyone’s time.
Of course, sometimes repetition does cross into getting in the way of other things. It happens here. A couple months ago, Leo started skipping his 10 minutes of nightly reading to work on his cars. I didn’t take the cars away or call the game a waste. I just said “You can have 25 minutes of car time after you finish your reading. It’s up to you.” It took two days of sticking to that before it became routine, no yelling, no fighting. If I’d framed the cars as bad, it would have turned into a power struggle, not a steady routine.
I saw the same thing play out in the classroom last year. We had a little boy who drew the same pickup truck on every free drawing day for three months. Another teacher suggested we encourage him to try new things, draw different objects. I said let’s wait. After three months, he added a driver. A week after that, he added a road. Then a house next to the road, then a dog running alongside the road. He built up his confidence slowly, on his own timeline. If we’d forced him to draw something new every week, he never would have gotten there.
After my sister left Saturday, I went over and sat on the floor next to Leo, and he made me count every car to make sure none were missing. I counted 32, just right, and he high-fived me. I still have those moments, when I scroll through Instagram and see other kids doing home science experiments and memorizing state capitals, and I think maybe my sister is right, maybe this is a waste. But then I remember that the focus he built lining up cars is the same focus he uses now to get through his 20-minute math homework without getting up. It’s practice for sticking with a hard thing, on his own terms.
It’s not always perfect. Some days I still rush him, some days I forget to watch and just redirect. I don’t think every repetitive thing is automatically valuable – if my kid was spending 4 hours a day mindlessly scrolling, I’d step in. But for the small, slow, silly things kids do that don’t come with a workbook or a learning badge? Most of the time, they’re not a waste. They’re just learning, that looks different than what we’re used to.
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