Is Unstructured Free Play a Waste of Time? A Mom And Former Elementary Teacher’s Perspective
Last Saturday, I was wiping coffee rings off the kitchen counter and folding the same load of laundry for the third time when my sister let herself in with a bag of donuts. She glanced down at my 7-year-old Leo, who’d been camped on the living room floor for 75 minutes, surrounded by crumpled Amazon boxes, half a roll of masking tape, and a pile of dusty bottle caps.
“Doesn’t that feel like a total waste of time?” she asked, quiet enough that Leo couldn’t hear, nodding at his project. “Mia’s doing a week of coding camp this month, and we fit 20 minutes of piano practice in before we came over. He could be actually learning something, right?”
I get the question. I’ve asked it myself, a hundred times. When I was teaching 4th grade full time, my admin pushed us to fill every minute of the school day with standards-aligned activity. Even indoor recess got swapped for educational apps and reading worksheets, because “down time is lost learning time.” I had a student named Javi that year who’d spend every indoor recess period folding scrap paper into tiny interlocking cubes. He never touched the apps. I’d walk by his desk and think, this is such a waste. He could be practicing his multiplication facts. I even pulled him aside once after class and asked if he wanted me to sign him up for the after school math club, since he had so much extra time on his hands. He just mumbled that he liked folding paper, and went back to his desk.
A month later, we were deep in our fractions unit, and most of the class was stuck on how to visualize equal parts. I’d drawn a hundred circles on the whiteboard, passed out paper circles to cut, and half the kids still came up after class confused. Javi raised his hand halfway through whole group, something he almost never did, and carried his whole stack of paper cubes up to the front. He took one apart, unfolded it, and held it up to the class. “Each side is the same size, right? I folded it until all the edges matched. So if this whole cube is one, each side is a fourth.” He walked around the room and let every kid hold one, and suddenly half the class went “oh, I get it.” I didn’t teach him that. He taught himself, messing around with scrap paper during what everyone thought was wasted time.
I knelt down next to Leo while my sister bit into a glazed donut. He’d been working on a car carrier for his matchbox cars, and the ramp he’d been gluing for 20 minutes had just fallen off for the third time. His tongue was stuck out the side of his mouth, and he had a smudge of tape on his left cheek. He didn’t even look up at us. I told my sister that Leo had already tried three different fixes on his own. Packing tape was too stiff, so that didn’t work. A glue stick held it for less than a minute. Now he was cutting a small notch into the side of the carrier to slot the ramp into, an idea I never would have thought of to give him. If this was a structured STEM activity I’d downloaded from Pinterest, I would have handed him step-by-step instructions, and he never would have had to work through three wrong solutions before getting it right.
I’ve started doing small, low-effort things to leave space for this kind of time now that I’ve seen how it works. I block off 25 minutes every weekday after school that’s completely unplanned – no screens, no homework, no adult telling him what to do. Some days he builds, some days he chases our cat around the house, some days he just doodles on scrap paper and throws it away. I don’t jump in to fix his problem when he gets frustrated anymore, either. Instead of saying “here, let me do that” when his ramp falls, I just say “that didn’t work. What do you think you can try differently?” It’s just two sentences, it doesn’t take any extra effort, and it lets him work through it on his own. I also stopped counting “learning” as only something that gets a grade or a finished product. Doodling isn’t a waste. Chasing the cat isn’t a waste. Even sitting on the porch watching ants crawl for 20 minutes isn’t a waste.
After my sister left, Leo got his ramp to work. He rolled a red matchbox truck down it, and it went all the way across the living room to the front door, and he cheered so loud the cat ran under the couch. Then he spent another half hour sorting his cars by how fast they went down the ramp, writing little tally marks on the side of the carrier with a crayon. That’s measurement, that’s data collection, that’s all stuff he’ll get tested on later, but he didn’t even know he was learning it.
I still have days where I get nervous. Last week, we had an hour before soccer practice, and Leo asked to build instead of practicing his spelling words for Friday’s test. I almost said no. I almost said that was a waste of time. But I let him, and when we drilled words in the car, he got 12 out of 15 right, which is better than he does when he’s already burnt out from back-to-back activities. I still see other parents posting about all the enrichment camps and tutoring their 7-year-olds are doing, and I get that little twinge of guilt. I still wonder sometimes if I’m doing enough.
But I think about Javi, and I think about Leo figuring out his ramp, and I don’t think unplanned time is a waste. Structured activities and intentional learning are fine – Leo loves soccer, I think coding camp is great for kids who enjoy it. But we’ve gotten into this habit of thinking every minute has to count for something visible, something we can talk about at parent nights or post on social media. The stuff that doesn’t show up on a test or a certificate is still sticking, even when we can’t see it. Right now, Leo’s car carrier is sitting in the corner of our living room, collecting dust. It fell apart two days after he built it, and he didn’t even want to fix it. But that doesn’t mean that hour and a half on the living room floor was wasted.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Is Unstructured Free Play a Waste of Time