Is My Kid’s Unstructured, “Silly” Activity A Waste Of Time? What I Learned As A Teacher And Mom
Last Tuesday, I was wiping crumbs off the kitchen counter after school, running through my mental checklist: spelling quiz after snack, reading log to sign, math worksheet to correct, 10 minutes of piano practice before dinner. When I glanced over, my 9-year-old Luka was cross-legged on the floor by the back door, twisting neon pipe cleaners into tiny circles and looping them one by one onto the porch gate slats. He’d already been there 22 minutes, by my clock, just doing that. My phone pinged with a text from my mom, who’d visited over the weekend: “Still messing with those pipe cleaners? Don’t you think that’s a waste of time he could spend reading?”
I almost texted back that she was right. As a third grade teacher, I’d sat through a staff meeting just two days earlier where we talked about “maximizing every instructional minute” and cutting out any activity that didn’t tie directly to a state test standard. That same week, I’d caught my student Mia doodling horses in the margins of her math quiz, instead of checking over her answers, and I’d tapped the paper with my pencil, giving her the look that says get back to work. Wasted time, I’d thought. Why can’t she use those 5 minutes for something that matters?
A couple days after that math quiz, we were doing a hands-on fraction lesson, cutting out paper circles to learn how to split a whole into equal parts. Half the class was complaining that their cuts were lopsided, when Mia raised her hand. She held up her perfectly split circle and said, “I do this all the time when I draw horse heads. You have to split the face right down the middle to get both eyes the same size. That’s how I got good at it.” I just stood there, because I’d almost marked her doodling as a waste the week before. No one had assigned her that practice. She was just doing it because she cared about drawing horses.
I went home that day, and I looked at Luka on the floor, still twisting pipe cleaners. He told me he was making bracelets for the squirrels that come to our bird feeder, so they can “look fancy.” I almost told him to put them away and get his reading book, but I stopped. I remembered Mia. I called the school occupational therapist later that week, just to ask, because Luka still struggles with messy handwriting. She said unstructured little activities like twisting pipe cleaner, braiding friendship bracelets, even folding paper airplanes build fine motor control way more consistently than the 5-minute handwriting drills we send home for homework. Because the kid is choosing to do it, so they focus more, and they do it longer than they’d ever do a worksheet. That made sense. Luka’s silly squirrel bracelets were doing more for his handwriting than the worksheet I was going to drag him away to do.
I started noticing how often I default to “waste of time” any time an activity doesn’t have a clear, adult-approved outcome. No grade, no sticker, no check on a parenting checklist, so it must be useless. I’ve started testing a small habit that works for me, both at school with my students and at home with Luka, when I get that itchy feeling that they’re wasting time. First, I just wait two minutes before I say anything. I don’t interrupt, I just watch. Last week, I caught Mia doodling again during silent reading, and instead of tapping her paper, I waited. After 10 minutes, she showed me her comic: a horse that goes to third grade and hides extra carrots in her desk. She’s writing three pages a day after school, she said. That’s more voluntary writing than most of my students do for homework all month.
Second, I ask one simple question: “Tell me about what you’re doing,” instead of jumping to “shouldn’t you be doing something else?” Nine times out of 10, they’ll tell you exactly what they’re learning, even if it’s not what you expected. Luka spent an hour after his pipe cleaner project leaning against the door, watching the squirrels, and told me that one squirrel has a nick in his ear and comes more often than the bigger gray one. That’s observation, that’s data collection, that’s the start of thinking like a biologist. It just didn’t come in a workbook.
Third, I only step in if the activity is actually causing a problem. If they’re hitting a sibling, or scrolling TikTok until 10pm on a school night, that’s when we switch. If they’re just doing something that looks silly and useless, I leave them be. I still mess up, of course. Two days ago, Luka was folding paper airplanes and throwing them at our cat for 15 minutes, and I snapped, told him to go get his reading log. I felt bad 5 minutes later, because I realized he was adjusting the wing angle every time, testing what made the plane go further. He was doing basic physics, and I cut it off to make him do a 10 minute reading log he was already done with.
I still care about spelling tests and piano practice and reading logs. I know some things really are a waste of time, like the hour he spent arguing with his friend over a Roblox glitch that didn’t even matter. But I’m trying to unlearn that default panic that any unplanned, unstructured, ungraded activity is useless. That lumpy little acorn and pipe cleaner bracelet Luka dropped on the floor last week is still on my fridge. It doesn’t count for any grade, it doesn’t help him pass any test, it doesn’t go on any college application. But it’s not a waste. Most days, when I catch myself asking “is this a waste of time,” it just means I’m not looking close enough to see what they’re actually learning.
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