Is Unstructured Play a Waste of Time? A Teacher Mom’s Real Take
Last Tuesday, I was pulling crumpled uniform shirts out of the dryer when my sister-in-law texted. She’d sent a screenshot of a TikTok caption that read, “If your 7-year-old is just playing instead of doing reading flashcards, you’re wasting their prime learning years.” Under it, she added: “Mia spends 2 hours a day on block castles. Is that actually a waste of time?”
I leaned against the dryer and stared at the message. I get the question. I’m a 3rd grade teacher and a mom of one 7-year-old, so I see both sides. I scroll the same parent groups, see the same ads for early literacy programs, hear the same quiet panic from other parents that we’re falling behind if our kids aren’t checking boxes every minute of the day.
The next morning, I stood in the living room doorway before leaving for school and watched Mia work. She’d spread every block we own across the rug, plus three plastic dinosaurs, a popsicle stick thermometer, and a half-folded paper blanket for a sick baby T-Rex. A golden retriever-sized crack split the tallest tower from the day before, when our dog stumbled through chasing a fly. She was kneeling, tongue half out of her mouth, stacking blue duplos to patch it. I thought about the playground at my school, and Javi and Marcus from last year.
For two whole weeks in spring, those two boys spent every single recess building a roller coaster in the far corner of the playground, out of fallen oak branches and piles of mulch. Their “car” was a glass marble Javi kept in his jeans pocket. The recess aide came to me twice complaining about it. She said they never joined the organized soccer games, never got “real exercise,” and the pile of sticks was a tripping hazard. “Isn’t this just a waste of time?” she asked me.
I told her I’d check it out. When I walked over, Javi was holding three different sticks up to a slope, frowning. “This one’s too thick, it blocks the marble,” he said to Marcus. Marcus pulled a handful of mulch out from under the bottom of the hill. “What if we make the end higher? That’s what my mom does when the fridge won’t close, she shoves a book under one side.” That day, I learned their roller coaster had three stations, a rule that no one could push the marble twice in a row, and they’d already rebuilt it three times after a group of first graders accidentally knocked it down. When the aide finally made them clean it up because it was blocking the access path, Javi went home and drew a full diagram of the design, with measurements for every stick, so they could rebuild it the next week.
That’s the thing about “wasting time” that no one talks about on TikTok. We’ve been taught to measure learning by what we can see: a finished worksheet, a memorized sight word, a test score. If it doesn’t check a box, we write it off as useless. But most of the useful learning that sticks doesn’t look like that.
Mia stacking blocks isn’t just stacking blocks. She’s counting how many blocks she needs for the base. She’s problem-solving when the tower falls, trying a new arrangement instead of giving up. She’s practicing storytelling and vocabulary when she explains the dinosaur hospital to anyone who will listen. Javi and Marcus weren’t just playing with sticks. They were testing out basic physics, practicing negotiation, learning how to keep going when their hard work gets knocked apart. Those are skills no worksheet can teach, because they have to be practiced on your own time, on something you care about.
The practical part that I tell other parents, and that I remind myself of on busy afternoons: instead of panicking and asking “is this a waste of time,” just run through three quick 10-second questions. First, is your child actually engaged, not just mindlessly scrolling? Second, are they making something, solving a problem, or exploring something they care about? Third, is it not hurting anyone else? If the answer to all three is yes, it’s not a waste.
I don’t just let anything go, of course. We have a non-negotiable 10 minutes of reading out loud every day before play time. If the block castle is clogging the only path through the living room, we set a rule: it can stay up all weekend, but we clean it up on Sunday evening before dinner. If my kid wants to spend an hour drawing doodles on the back of notebook paper instead of doing extra math problems after homework, I say “you can have 20 more minutes, then we need to clean up for soccer practice.” That’s it. No need to take the paper away, no need to lecture about productive time. Small boundaries work better than shutting down the thing they care about.
I still catch myself some days. Last week, we had a free Saturday morning, and Mia wanted to dig for worms in the backyard instead of doing the new alphabet workbook my mom sent us. I stood by the back door for five minutes, twisting my hands, thinking we should do the workbook. Then I grabbed a trowel and joined her. We found 12 worms, put them in a bucket with dirt, watched them for half an hour, then put them back. She told me everything she knows about how worms help grass grow, stuff she learned from a library book she picked out on her own. I couldn’t have quizzed her on that after a worksheet.
My sister-in-law came over that weekend, and Mia dragged her to the living room to show off the dinosaur kingdom. She talked for 10 minutes straight about the sick baby T-Rex, how the hospital worked, what the dinosaurs were going to do after he got better. After Mia ran to get lemonade, my sister-in-law said, “I haven’t heard her talk that much about anything, not even her dance recital.”
I still don’t know if all this unstructured time will pay off in some big, check-the-box way later. Mia might not memorize 100 sight words faster than the other kids in her class right now. But right now, she knows how to start a project, how to fix it when it breaks, how to tell a good story. Some days that feels like more than enough. It’s working for us, for now.
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