Is My Kid’s Unstructured, Pointless-Seeming Play a Waste of Time? What I Learned As A Mom And Teacher
Last Saturday, I was folding mismatched school socks on the dryer, my third coffee of the day half-cold on the counter, when my phone pinged. It was my sister, responding to the quick Instagram story I’d posted of my 7-year-old Jax hunched over his bedroom rug. “All that moving rocks around again?” her text read. “Don’t you think that’s a waste of time? Mia does 30 minutes of reading practice and soccer drills every Saturday, and she’s already reading whole chapter books.”
I paused, my hand hovering over a holey athletic sock, and looked through the doorway at Jax. For three hours, he’d been rearranging the rock collection he’s built over six months of creek walks and backyard digs. One week he sorts by size. The next, by shininess. That day, he was separating them into old egg cartons he’d fished out of my recycling bin, moving one or two at a time, stopping to rub a particularly stripey one between his thumb and forefinger before finding its spot. It looked like nothing, on the surface. No worksheets, no skill checks, no clear end product. I’ve had that same thought myself, more than once: Is this just a waste of time?
I used to think that way for a living, back when I taught first grade. I remember a boy named Leo in my second year of teaching, who’d spend every single minute of free choice folding and refolding sheets of construction paper into smaller and smaller squares. I’d walk over, remind him the block center was open, or the art table had paint, and he’d just nod and keep folding. I marked it as wasted time in my lesson notes, back when I thought every minute of the school day needed to be tied to a learning standard. I even pulled him aside once to ask if he’d rather try something new, and he just looked up at me and said, “I like folding.”
It wasn’t until a year later, when I ran into his mom at the grocery store, that I thought about it again. She told me Leo had started folding origami after he left my class, moved on to paper airplanes with different wing shapes, and by second grade was obsessed with figuring out what made one plane fly farther than another. He was acing his geometry tests, asking for math workbooks for Christmas, and could sit and focus on a single problem for 45 minutes straight – all that starting from folding tiny squares of paper that I’d written off as a waste of time.
That story stuck with me after I had Jax, but it still took me a long time to unlearn the urge to fill every empty minute with something “useful.” When he was 4, I had a closet full of educational activity boxes, alphabet matching puzzles, STEM kits that promised to turn my toddler into a problem solver. I felt guilty if more than an hour went by and he wasn’t doing something that looked like learning. Then I got a really bad cold one spring weekend, and could barely get off the couch. I told Jax he could do whatever he wanted, as long as he didn’t climb on the bookshelf. He spent two full days digging in the backyard behind our shed, pulling up old shards of pottery and rusted nails, calling them his dinosaur fossil collection. He talked about that dig for a month, asked me to check out three library books about paleontology, and still has a jar of his “fossils” on his dresser. He learned more that weekend than he ever did from any $30 activity kit.
The thing I’ve figured out, slowly, is that we usually get the question wrong. When we ask “is this a waste of time,” we’re usually measuring it against some external list of skills we think our kids need right now. But almost all the time, the stuff that looks like nothing is actually doing the work that matters most. It’s not that structured activities or practice are bad – Jax loves his weekly soccer practice, and we read together every night. But when we cut short the kid-led stuff that looks pointless, we’re taking away the time they need to practice focus, follow their curiosity, and figure out what they care about.
I’ve started doing three small things that make this easier, when I feel the guilt creeping in. First, if I’m itching to interrupt to suggest something “more productive,” I set a 10-minute timer on my phone. I go back to whatever I’m doing, and by the time the timer goes off, I can see that he’s not bored – he’s engaged. Nine times out of 10, I don’t say anything. Second, if I do want to join in, I don’t ask “what are you making?” or “what are you learning?” that puts pressure on him to turn his play into a performance. I just ask “can you show me how you sorted that?” and let him lead the conversation. Third, when other people comment like my sister did, I don’t bother defending my choices. I just say “he’s having fun” and change the subject. It’s none of their business what we do with our time, anyway.
Last Saturday, after I read my sister’s text, I put the sock down, wiped the lint off my jeans, and walked into Jax’s room. I sat down cross-legged on the rug next to his egg cartons, and asked him why he moved all the striped gray rocks to the bottom row. He lit up, and explained that plain gray rocks are mountain rocks, and striped ones come from the river, so they have to go with the other wet rocks. We sat there for 10 minutes, moving rocks around, and I didn’t try to turn it into a science lesson or a counting exercise. I just listened.
I still have days where I scroll through parenting content and wonder if I’m doing enough, if I should be filling more of Jax’s time with structured practice and new skills. Some weeks, we have too much unstructured time, and he ends up bickering with our cat and complaining he’s bored. I don’t know if this will pay off in some big way later, if all the rock sorting will turn into a love of geology or a good grade in high school chemistry. But right now, it doesn’t look like a waste of time to me. It just looks like childhood.
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