Is Unstructured Play For Kids A Waste Of Time? A Former Teacher And Mom’s Perspective
Last Saturday, I was folding fitted sheets at the kitchen table when my 7-year-old, Leo, called me over from the living room rug. “Come see how I sorted them this time,” he said, waving a piece of chalk he’d used to draw lines on the floor to divide his rock collection into sections. I’d just folded the third sheet when my next-door neighbor, Jen, dropped by to drop off her son’s birthday party invite. She leaned past me to look at Leo, who was hunched over moving a gray chunk of granite from one group to another, and lowered her voice. “Wow, he’s been at that for almost an hour, right? Don’t you worry all that’s just a waste of time?”
I told her I used to think that too, back when I was teaching second grade. I had a student named Mia who spent every single 20-minute reading center rearranging our classroom book bin instead of picking a book to read. First she sorted by cover color, then by book size, then by how thick the spine was. After a month of this, I pulled her mom in for a conference and shared my concern that Mia was wasting all her reading time and falling behind on her independent reading goal. Her mom just laughed and said Mia did the same thing at home with the spice rack, her closet, and her collection of stuffed animals. She just liked organizing, creating order that made sense to her.
A couple weeks later, Mia finished sorting the bin by size and noticed all the thin books on the bottom shelf were our classroom poetry collections. She started flipping through them, then started reading them out loud to the other kids at her table. By the end of the semester, she’d read more poetry books than any other kid in the class. Turned out she hated the open-ended “pick any book” rule. It overwhelmed her. She needed to create order first, make the space feel hers, before she could do what we thought she was supposed to do. That moment stuck with me, long before I had my own kid.
Jen nodded, but said she still can’t shake the feeling that any minute not spent working toward some skill or milestone is wasted. Her son has math tutoring twice a week, coding on Wednesdays, soccer on Saturdays, and there’s barely enough time for dinner, let alone hours of sorting rocks. I get it. I used to schedule every minute of Leo’s day when he was 4, bouncing from music class to art class to structured story time, because I was terrified he’d get behind before he even started kindergarten. Then I got a flat tire on the way to gym class one day, and we ended up stuck at home for two hours with no planned activities. Leo spent the whole time pulling all the dried pasta out of the pantry and sorting it by shape. I sat there panicking at first, about the missed class and the wasted morning, until I realized he was counting each pile, telling me which shapes had more, which were longer, which fit inside each other. It was a better math lesson than any gym class I’d have dragged him to.
These days, whenever I catch myself thinking “is this a waste of time,” I run through three quick questions before I intervene. It takes 10 seconds, and it’s changed how I show up for Leo as a parent and for my former students as a teacher. First: Is anyone getting hurt or breaking something that matters? If not, I move to the second question. Second: Is this keeping them from something they have to do—like homework, bedtime, or getting in the car for school? If it’s their free time, it’s none of my business to fill it. Third: Are they engaged, or just mindlessly scrolling and complaining they’re bored? If they’re engaged, even in something that looks useless to me, I leave them alone.
For teachers, this can look like leaving 10 unstructured minutes at the end of every work period, no assigned task, just let kids mess with whatever materials are already out. For parents, it looks like leaving 20 minutes of blank space on the after-school schedule every day, no activities, no screens, just whatever they want to do. Staring out the car window counts. Sorting socks by color counts. Drawing the same dinosaur 17 times in a row counts.
Two months ago, Leo spent two straight afternoons drawing the same T-Rex over and over on every scrap of paper he could find. I almost threw half of them away when he wasn’t looking, because I thought it was just mindless scribbling. Then he got frustrated that he couldn’t get the teeth right, and asked me to get his dinosaur encyclopedia out. He spent another hour reading about T-Rex jaws, comparing different skeletons, trying different sizes of teeth. By the end of the week, he gave his best drawing to his uncle, who’s a paleontologist, and could tell him three facts about T-Rex teeth I didn’t even know. That whole thing started with what looked like a waste of time.
I still mess this up. Last week, we were running 10 minutes behind for piano lessons, and Leo was rearranging his sparkly rock section for his grandma’s upcoming birthday present, and I almost snapped and made him leave it half done. I caught myself, counted to 10, and waited the extra two minutes. We got to piano one minute late, which no one cared about. Some days, when I’m stressed about work and our long to-do list, I still rush him. I still sometimes think that all this unplanned, useless-seeming stuff isn’t adding up to anything. But more often than not, I pause now. I don’t know if all this rock sorting and dinosaur drawing will turn into a career or an award or a high test score down the line. But it’s not a waste. It’s just kid time, time for them to figure out what they care about, in their own order, on their own timeline.
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