Is Unstructured Doodling For Kids A Waste Of Time? A Teacher’s Perspective
The fluorescent lights in my 4th grade classroom hum so loud by 3:15 pm, you can barely hear yourself think. Last month, I sat across from Mia’s mom at our parent-teacher conference, my third cold coffee of the day sweating through its paper cup, when she leaned forward and tapped the progress note I’d sent home two days earlier. “Mia spends almost every free minute drawing tiny cats in the margins of her notebooks,” she said. “At home, she does it during homework breaks, in the car on the way to piano, even at the dinner table when she’s done eating. I keep telling her she should use that time to read an extra chapter or practice her math facts. Is this just… a waste of time?”
The half-eaten chocolate chip cookie she’d picked up from the PTA bake sale sat on the corner of my desk, crumbs sprinkled over my stack of ungraded multiplication quizzes. I’ve been teaching long enough to know this question isn’t really about cats or doodling. It’s the same question I get at least three times a conference week, about everything from rock collecting to repetitive pretend tea parties to endless Lego building: Is this thing my kid loves that doesn’t “count” for anything a waste of time?
A few years ago, I would have agreed that it was. Admin pushed us to add 20 extra minutes of test prep to our daily schedule, so I cut our 20-minute free choice period entirely. I told myself all that unstructured messing around was just wasted time anyway, that we’d get more learning done. What I didn’t expect was how much more wiggly and distracted the kids got during actual instruction. Within two weeks, the number of kids turning in incomplete homework jumped by 30%. The kids who’d spent free choice doodling or sorting their rock collections were the ones passing notes under the desk or staring out the window mid-lesson, because they had nowhere else to put that extra mental energy. I brought free choice back after three weeks, and started paying closer attention to what the “wasted” time actually looked like.
I pulled up Mia’s recent narrative writing assignment on my laptop and turned the screen toward her mom. The prompt was “Write a story about an unexpected adventure.” Mia’s story was about three stray cats that live behind the school dumpster, who sneak into the playground after everyone leaves to play soccer. Each cat had a personality that matched the tiny doodles she draws in her notebook: one has a torn ear from a fight with a raccoon, one only eats cheese puffs that kids drop, one hides in the slide when it rains. “She didn’t just pull this out of nowhere,” I said. “Those cats have been living in her notebook for months. This is her practicing storytelling, working out what she notices about the world, when it looks like she’s just scribbling.”
I get the impulse to worry, though. My son is in 5th grade now, and for a year he spent at least an hour every night folding origami cranes after he finished his homework. I’d look in his room after dinner and see hundreds of cranes lined up on his windowsill, and I’d think, this is a waste of time. He could be reading, he could be practicing for his soccer game, why is he just folding the same thing over and over? Then last spring, when he was struggling with long division and crying every night over his homework, I went in to check on him after he’d slammed his door. He’d folded 15 cranes instead of finishing the last three problems. When I leaned over, I saw he’d written one division problem on the wing of each crane. He told me folding let his brain think about the problems without getting stuck on how hard they were. The repetitive movement calmed him down enough to memorize the steps. I’d been seeing it as wasted time, but it was how he was working through the thing I cared most about him learning.
What I tell parents now is that before you decide something is a waste of time, try three small things first. First, track when it happens. Is your kid doodling instead of doing their homework, or are they doodling during the 15 minutes you’re waiting for their doctor’s appointment, after they’ve already finished all their work? Nine times out of ten, the thing you think is wasting time is filling small gaps that would otherwise be filled with mindless scrolling anyway. Second, if it is bleeding into time you need for other things, don’t ban it – schedule it. Instead of snapping “Put the doodle away and do your homework,” try “Let’s get your homework done first, then you can have 20 minutes to draw your cats before bed.” That lets them hold onto the thing they love, while setting clear boundaries around what needs to get done. Third, once a week, ask one simple question: “Can you tell me about what you’re working on here?” You’ll be surprised how much thought goes into the thing that looks like mindless messing around.
That doesn’t mean nothing is ever a waste of time. If your kid is spending three hours a day mindlessly scrolling TikTok instead of doing homework or sleeping, that’s a different story. But the things that parents usually flag as wasted time – the small, repetitive, unproductive hobbies that don’t come with a grade or a trophy or a portfolio – almost never are.
Back to Mia’s conference. Her mom sat there for a minute scrolling through Mia’s cat story, smiling a little she didn’t notice she was doing. She said she still worries Mia will get distracted during big tests, that she’ll care more about her cats than her homework. But she also said she’d stop nagging her about drawing during car rides, and she’d ask her to tell her about the cats next time she saw her scribbling. Last week, Mia brought a stapled little zine of all her cat stories to class, and passed it around to her friends during recess. It’s not going to show up on her end-of-grade test, it’s not going to get her into an art program next year. But it’s something she made, something that made her happy, something that taught her how to tell a story before anyone ever asked her to. I still leave conferences wondering sometimes if I’m right, if I’m giving parents the right advice. Most days, though, I look at all the cat doodles and origami cranes and rock collections, and I think the time we worry is wasted is just time our kids are using to grow, in a way that’s too quiet for us to see right away. We’re all just figuring it out as we go.
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