Is Your Kid’s Constant Doodling A Waste Of Time? What I Learned As A Mom And 4th Grade Teacher
Last Tuesday, I was grading 28 book reports at my kitchen table, cold coffee sweating next to my elbow, our beagle chewing a hole in the toe of my favorite sneaker under the table. My 10-year-old, Jax, was sitting across from me cranking out his 4th grade fractions homework, and when I glanced up to stretch, I noticed barely half the page had numbers on it. The rest was covered in tiny doodles: spaceships with neon blue engines, a three-eyed alien wearing a little baseball cap, a stick figure version of our cat napping on a rocket. I sighed and tapped the page with my pen. “Jax, is this why you’ve been at this for 45 minutes? All this doodling—isn’t this just a waste of time?”
He looked up, eraser behind his ear, and frowned. “I’m still doing the math. It helps me not think about how boring fractions are. If I don’t draw, I start thinking about the new Minecraft update I want and forget to do the problems.”
That line stuck with me, because just three days before that, I’d had the exact same thought about Mia, one of my own 4th grade students. For the whole first semester, I’d been gently correcting her every time I saw little roses and horses spilling into the margins of her reading quizzes. “Let’s save the drawing for art class, okay? Focus on the work,” I’d say, and she’d nod and erase, but ten minutes later the doodles were back. Then we graded our winter practice reading test last month, and Mia scored 12 percentage points higher than she ever had before—her paper was so covered in doodles you could barely see the answer choices half the time.
I’d always bought into the idea that any extra activity while learning was a waste of time. If your hands are drawing, your brain isn’t working, right? That’s the rule I’d had in my classroom for years, and the rule I enforced at home for Jax’s homework. But after Mia’s test and Jax’s comment, I started poking around, talking to the special ed teacher down the hall, reading a few small research notes that popped up on my teacher feed. Turns out, doodling fills that little bit of extra brain space we all have when we’re doing something that doesn’t require 100% of our focus all at once. If that extra space is empty, our brain wanders off to something way more interesting than fractions or reading comprehension, and we waste way more time trying to get back on track than we ever would drawing a few alien stick figures.
I started testing small changes first in my classroom, then at home. Instead of banning doodles entirely, I now point out to kids that the entire left margin of every worksheet and the back of the page is free game for drawing. We don’t let doodles cover up the answers, but as long as the work is legible and getting done, it doesn’t bother me. For Jax at homework time, I keep a stack of scrap paper next to his desk, so he can doodle as much as he wants without covering up his math problems. It’s such a small change, it takes 10 seconds to grab an extra scrap of paper, but it’s made a huge difference. Jax doesn’t get defensive when I check in on his work anymore, and he finishes his homework 10 minutes faster on average than he did when I was nagging him to stop drawing every five minutes.
Last week I even tried it myself during a 2 ½ hour district training meeting, where I usually spend half the time scrolling through my grocery list under the table and miss half the information. I doodled little coffee mugs and house plants in the margin of my notebook the whole time, and when I got home I could actually remember three new reading strategies the presenter talked about, instead of just the snack break. It was weird, but it worked.
That doesn’t mean doodling never turns into a waste of time, of course. Last week Jax spent 20 minutes drawing a whole alien city instead of finishing his spelling practice, and I had to step in. I’ve got a couple of kids in my class who use doodling to avoid starting work they find hard, so it’s not a free for all. My rule of thumb now is simple: if your work is getting done on time, and you’re understanding the material, the doodles stay. If the doodling is taking over and the work isn’t getting finished, we put the drawing away until you’re done. It’s easy to remember, and it doesn’t require me to micromanage every kid’s every movement during class.
I still catch myself defaulting to the old thought sometimes, that any activity that isn’t the actual work we’re supposed to be doing is a waste of time. We’re all so pushed for time these days—homework has to get done, lessons have to get finished, there’s a million things to check off the list before dinner. It’s easy to see any extra thing as a waste. But over the past few months, I’ve started asking a different question before I tell a kid to stop: is this getting in the way of the work, or is it helping? More often than not, the thing I thought was a total waste of time is actually helping them get the work done better than if I’d made them stop.
Jax still covers his homework margins in aliens. Mia still draws roses next to every answer. Their grades haven’t dropped, they’re less stressed during work time, and I don’t have to nag them half as much. I still don’t have all the answers, and I’m sure I’ll change my mind about a dozen more “wastes of time” before Jax finishes high school. So far, this one’s working out just fine.
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