Is My Kid’s Unstructured Play Actually a Waste of Time? A Teacher Parent’s Perspective
Last Tuesday, I was folding matching socks on the living room couch, peeking down the hall at my 10-year-old Jake’s open bedroom door. He was supposed to have wrapped up his 30 minutes of required reading for homework 10 minutes earlier, so I could sign his log before his dad got home with dinner. Instead of curled up with his dog novel, he was cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by crumpled Amazon boxes, empty toilet paper rolls, and a half-used roll of packing tape I’d been missing for a week. He was building a penguin enclosure for the beat-up stuffed penguin he dragged everywhere from our summer trip to the aquarium.
I knocked and leaned in. “Jake, reading log?” He didn’t look up from propping a cardboard gate against the fence. “Just 10 more minutes. The hinge keeps falling off, and if it breaks the penguin will escape when the zookeeper’s on break.”
My first thought, the one that pops into my head almost automatically these days, was: This is a waste of time. He’s putting off school work, messing around with garbage when he should be checking off his assigned tasks. I’m a 4th grade teacher, for crying out loud. I should be on top of making sure homework gets done right?
Then I thought about Mia, one of my students this year. Three weeks earlier, I’d caught her spending the entire 20 minute free reading period drawing horses in the margins of her reading notebook instead of turning pages in the chapter book she’d checked out from the library. Another teacher walking by my classroom door slowed down and mouthed “What a waste” to me, and I nodded at the time, because that’s what we’re trained to think, right? If it’s not assigned, graded, or working toward a clear adult goal, it’s a waste.
But that time, instead of walking over and telling Mia to put the pencil down and read, I waited until the bell rang and asked her what she was drawing. Turns out she was writing her own story about a girl who tames wild horses on her grandma’s farm, and the drawings were character sketches for each horse. She’d already written six pages, she just didn’t want anyone to see it yet because she thought it wasn’t good enough.
So I went back to Jake’s room, sat down on the floor next to the pile of cardboard, and asked him what was so tricky about the hinge. He jumped into explaining: he’d tried taping it straight first, but that made it stick shut. Then he tried putting a little roll of extra cardboard in between the gate and the fence to make it swing, but the roll was too thick. He counted out how many toilet paper rolls he’d used for the back fence, told me he needed three more to make it tall enough so the penguin couldn’t climb out. By the time he finished talking, I realized he’d spent 25 minutes working on measurement, trial and error, and problem solving that was way more engaged than the half-asleep reading he probably would have rushed through just to get his log signed.
That doesn’t mean I just let homework slide, though. I’ve worked out a few small, low-fuss things I do now when I’m wondering if whatever my kid or my student is doing is a waste of time. First, I never shut it down immediately. I just ask those two simple questions: What are you working on? What’s the tricky part you’re trying to fix? It takes 30 seconds, and more often than not, I find out they’re learning something I wouldn’t have guessed. For Mia, we worked out a deal: she can spend two of her four weekly free reading periods working on her horse story, and she reads her assigned book the other two. Last month she turned that story into the district’s young writing contest and won third place.
Second, if we have time to shift things a little, that’s what I do. With Jake that Tuesday, we agreed he could have 15 more minutes to finish the hinge, then he’d do his reading right after dinner, instead of before. We didn’t miss anything, no one was late for anything, and he got to finish the thing he was deep in. I don’t do this for every little thing, obviously. If we have to leave for piano lesson in two minutes and he’s just starting a new rock collection sorting session, that’s a hard stop. But when it’s just a matter of rearranging 15 or 20 minutes, it’s worth it.
I still have days where I snap. Last week, Jake spent 20 minutes wrapping rubber bands around a stick to make a “marshmallow launcher” when we were already running late for his soccer game. I made him throw the stick in the junk drawer and reminded him we could work on it after the game, and I still felt annoyed the whole drive there, wondering why he can’t just get ready when I tell him to. Some days, it really does feel like a waste.
But more and more, I’m learning that what looks like wasting time is just how kids learn to figure things out on their own. They don’t get that practice from checking off pre-made homework boxes all the time. I don’t have it all figured out. Some weeks I’m better at pausing than others. But those 30 seconds of asking what they’re working on has changed how I see all that “messing around” that used to bug me. Right now, Jake’s penguin enclosure is sitting on his bookshelf. The hinge still falls off sometimes, but he’s already talking about rebuilding it this weekend with better cardboard he pulled from a new fridge box. I’m not going to call that a waste.
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