Is Your Kid’s Doodling A Waste Of Time? What I’ve Learned As A 4th Grade Teacher
Last week, I wrapped up fall parent-teacher conferences with a last-minute slot that ran 15 minutes over. Jax’s mom pushed through my classroom door, holding a crumpled math notebook in one hand and a half-empty iced coffee with a lipstick ring around the lid in the other. She sat down, sighed, and flipped the notebook open to the first page. Every inch of every margin was covered: tiny T-Rexes peeking out from long division problems, brontosaurus necks winding between spelling words, a whole stegosaurus drawn across the back of a multiplication test. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I take the notebook away. I tell him he’s wasting time he should be focusing on his work. He draws for an hour every night after homework instead of doing the extra math sheets I bought. Is this just a waste of time?”
I told her I used to ask the same question. When I was a first-year teacher, five years ago, I had a student named Mia who drew tabby cats on every single worksheet. I’d scrawl “focus!” in the margin, I even took her beat-up sketchbook away once after she drew a whole cat picnic during a grammar quiz. A week later, when she came in after school to get it, I flipped through it while she packed her bag. It wasn’t random scribbles. She had whole story arcs: a group of stray cats that ran a bookstore out of an abandoned house, maps of the neighborhood they lived in, little dialogue bubbles between characters. She was writing a whole novel in that sketchbook, one drawing at a time, when her brain had extra space during class. That’s when I started paying closer attention.
I started keeping track of who doodled and who didn’t during lessons. The kids who filled their margins? Most of them could answer my random off-the-cuff questions faster than the kids who sat perfectly still staring at the board, their minds off somewhere else. Turns out, for a lot of kids, especially the ones whose brains like to move a little, doodling is not a distraction—it’s a tool. It keeps the busy, restless part of their brain occupied so the other part can focus on what I’m teaching.
I asked Jax’s mom what Jax draws, besides just dinosaurs. She softened a little, flipping a page. He draws whole dinosaur theme parks. He makes blueprints for the enclosures, writes out how big each one has to be, draws ticket booths and gift shops, prices out the souvenirs. I pointed to a blueprint on the page he was holding: the enclosure was 120 feet long and 50 feet wide, he’d written that out in the corner. “That’s measurement,” I said. “He’s practicing the exact skill we’re working on in math right now, just in a way that matters to him.”
My sister has an 11-year-old son who draws Fortnite characters 90 minutes every day after school. She spent six months convinced it was a total waste of time, that he should be reading or practicing piano instead. Then last Christmas, he finished a 60-page graphic novel about a group of Fortnite characters that get stuck in a real-life snow globe. He turned it in for a creative writing assignment at the start of this school year, and his teacher entered it in the state student writing contest. It didn’t win, but his writing’s gone from a C average to an A- in a year, because he’s actually motivated to write and edit and get better at something he cares about.
I gave Jax’s mom three small, concrete things to try, instead of just banning doodling entirely. First, get a cheap 50-cent sketchbook to keep in his homework bag. Instead of letting him cover every page of his school notebook, agree that small margin doodles are fine, and he can do bigger drawings in the sketchbook when he’s done with his work. Second, agree on a set time: 30 minutes of drawing every night right after he finishes his regular homework, before any extra practice or screen time. That gives him something to work toward, instead of him sneaking doodles in the middle of assignments because he’s dying to get that idea down on paper. Third, once a week, spend two minutes looking at his drawings and ask one question. It doesn’t have to be a big conversation—just “What’s this dinosaur’s name?” or “Why did you put the gift shop here?” That’s it, no big speech about productivity or creativity.
It’s been almost four months since that conference. I saw Jax in the hallway last week, and he ran over to pull me out of my line to show me his latest drawing. It was a dinosaur water park, with a slide that curved right past a tank holding a megalodon. He pointed to the corner where he’d written out his profit calculations: 120 visitors, $12 for adults, $8 for kids, 70 kids and 50 adults, total $980. He grinned and told me that was more money than his mom makes cleaning houses in a whole day.
I told his mom that when I saw her at pickup last Friday. She laughed, and wiped a smudge of pencil lead off Jax’s cheek. She said she still finds crumpled doodle papers all over the kitchen table, and sometimes he still draws so much during independent work that he has to finish a little homework at night. She still wonders sometimes if it’s a waste of time, if he should be putting that energy into something “more useful.” But she doesn’t take his notebook away anymore. It’s not a fight every night anymore.
I get asked this question all the time, not just about doodling. Is letting my kid play Roblox for an hour after school a waste of time? Is collecting rocks, or making friendship bracelets, or watching old nature documentaries a waste of time? A lot of the time, we look at the things kids love that don’t come with a grade or a test or a trophy, and we assume they’re just filling time. Sometimes they are, I guess. But more often than not, they’re practicing problem-solving, creativity, even the math and reading we worry they’re missing. It just doesn’t look like the homework we remember doing.
I don’t have all the answers. Jax might never become an artist or an architect, and his dinosaur parks might never turn into anything bigger than a stack of sketchbooks in his closet. But right now, they’re making him excited to go to school, they’re getting him to finish his math homework, and they’re making him happy. That doesn’t feel like a waste of time to me.
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