Is your kid’s endless doodling a waste of time? A teacher’s honest take
Last month, I sat across from my 10-year-old son’s math teacher at a fall conference, and she nodded at his frayed spiral notebook peeking out of his folder. “He’s such a sharp kid, but all this—” she flipped it open to page after page of tiny scaly dragons, tangled in constellations, poking their heads out of long division boxes “—is this a waste of time? He’d finish his work way faster if he’d stop drawing.”
I flipped through the pages myself, running my thumb over the little names scribbled under each dragon: Firebreath, Rockboy, Princess Stab. I didn’t tell her I’m a 4th grade teacher myself, and half my own students’ notebooks look exactly the same. For years, I’d scribbled notes on progress reports about “off-task behavior” just like she almost did that day. It took one quiet student changing my mind, then my own son, to make me stop and ask the question we all ask a hundred times as parents and teachers: Is this thing a waste of time?
Three years ago, I had a 3rd grade student named Mia transfer into my class mid-year. She barely spoke above a whisper, never finished her writing assignments, and every single paper that came back had dozens of tiny daisies drawn in the margins, each with a different number of petals. I pulled her aside a dozen times, reminded her to focus, told her we’d save the drawing for art class. At parent-teacher conferences that fall, her mom leaned forward and asked if I’d noticed the petals. “She counts them when she’s anxious,” she said. “If she doesn’t know what to write next, she draws five petals for five paragraphs, three petals for three main ideas. It’s how she slows her brain down enough to think.”
I felt my chest get tight. I’d spent months seeing what looked like a waste of time, and missed that it was her way of doing the work I was asking her to do. After that, I started paying attention. I noticed the kids who tapped their pencils through read-aloud could answer every comprehension question. The kid who built little Lego structures under his desk during math could explain fractions better than any kid in the class. It turns out, for a lot of kids—especially the ones whose brains move a little faster than the classroom pace—those “wasted” movements or drawings are just self-regulation. The part of their brain that gets bored needs something to do, so the rest can focus on the work.
After my son’s conference, we got ice cream on the way home, and I asked him about the dragons. “If the math is easy, drawing keeps my brain from wandering off,” he said, digging sprinkles out of the bottom of his cone. “If it’s hard, I draw one dragon while I think about the problem. If I don’t draw, I just sit there and panic that I don’t get it.”
That’s the thing no one tells you when you’re worrying about all the little habits your kid has that look like wasted time: most of the time, they can tell you exactly what it’s for, if you ask the right question. I used to just snap “stop that, pay attention” before I even thought to ask. Now I have a few small things I do, both with my own kids and my students, that take five seconds and change everything.
First, instead of assuming it’s a distraction, I ask a concrete question: “Does drawing help you focus right now, or is it taking your attention away from what you’re doing?” Nine times out of ten, the answer is clear. My son says it helps. The kid scrolling TikTok while he’s supposed to write an essay will admit it’s just making him forget what he was writing. It’s not that every “time-wasting” habit is helpful—it’s that you don’t know until you ask.
Then, if it does help, I set small boundaries instead of a full ban. For my son, that means no drawing on the standardized test answer sheets that have to be scanned, but drawing in the margins of his class notebook is totally fine. For my students, the rule is simple: if you turn in your work on time and can answer my question when I call on you, your margin doodles stay. If you’re so focused on drawing you’re missing the lesson, we tuck the notebook away until you’re done working. It’s low effort, no big fight, and it works way better than a blanket ban. If you’re nervous about trying it, do a two-week trial. Keep track of work completion and grades, and see what actually changes. I’ve never once had a class where average grades dropped after I allowed doodling for kids who say it helps.
I still slip up, of course. Last week, I caught myself about to tell my 10-year-old he was wasting an hour rearranging his rock collection instead of working on his nonfiction book report. I stopped myself, and by the end of the hour, he’d decided to write his report on rock classification, using his own collection as examples. He got an A. Some of the “wasted” time isn’t even for focus—it’s for creativity, for problem-solving, for practicing things that don’t show up on a grade sheet. That three hours he spent building a cardboard castle that fell apart 10 minutes after he finished? He problem-solved three different ways to prop up the towers, laughed through the collapse, and asked if we could try again next weekend. That’s not nothing.
My son still draws dragons all over his math notebook. Last quarter, his grade went up 5%, and his teacher told me she’s stopped bothering him about it now that she sees it doesn’t hurt his work. I still have days where I look at something he’s doing—talking to his friend about Minecraft for 45 minutes after school, sorting his sticker collection by color instead of practicing piano—and think, is that just a waste?
I don’t have a neat answer for every time. Some days, it is just messing around, and we do need to wrap it up to get homework done. But more often than not, the thing that looks like a waste is just how their brain works. Right now, we’re just taking it one question at a time. That’s enough for us.
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