Is Your Kid’s Messing Around Actually a Waste of Time? Parenting Tips From a Classroom Teacher
Last Tuesday, I was grading 4th grade personal narratives at the kitchen table, my coffee gone cold an hour earlier, goldfish cracker crumbs sticking to the bottom of my laptop. My 8-year-old son Leo was propped on the other end of the table, his beat-up old iPad resting on a stack of picture books. For 25 minutes, he hadn’t moved except to tap the screen and erase. I’d glanced over a dozen times, and every time, he was drawing the same thing: an orange tabby cat sitting on the same gnarled oak branch.
My first thought, the one that pops into my head almost every afternoon these days, was: Is this a waste of time? I almost opened my mouth to suggest he switch gears – finish the 10 minutes of math homework he put off, build the new Lego set that’s been sitting unopened by the couch, anything that feels like “progress” by my adult standards. I’m a teacher, after all. I’m supposed to prioritize productive use of time.
Then I remembered the email I got from Mia’s mom three weeks earlier. Mia’s one of my students, and she spends every single free minute in class drawing poison dart frogs in the margin of her notebook. Her mom wrote asking if I could redirect her to more useful activities during reading break – she was worried all that frog drawing was just a waste of time that could be spent practicing multiplication or reading chapter books.
I pushed my chair back an inch, and instead of interrupting, I did what I’ve started trying to do lately: I paused for two full minutes and just watched. Leo tilted the iPad a little closer to his face, adjusted the brush opacity slider with his thumb, tapped once, then frowned and erased just the tip of the cat’s front paw. He tried again. That’s when I asked the one question I’ve started using instead of jumping to judgment: “What’s the hardest part of what you’re doing right now?”
He didn’t even look up. “Getting the shadow under the paw right,” he said. “If it’s too dark, the cat doesn’t look like it’s actually on the branch. If it’s too light, you can’t see it. I’ve been working on this for three days.”
Three days of drawing the same cat to get one shadow right. On paper, that looks like a waste of time. No checklist box gets checked, no grade is given, no new skill is marked off on a report card. But what I’ve learned in the last few years, both as a mom and a teacher, is that most of what we label as wasting time is just learning that doesn’t fit the adult idea of productivity.
After I talked to Mia’s mom, we agreed she’d keep drawing her frogs during free time, as long as she got her core work done first. A month later, Mia signed up for the school science fair, and her project was all about the habitat of poison dart frogs. She illustrated every single board herself, wrote four pages of research she did on her own after school, and even came up with her own experiment testing how different leaf textures affect frog body temperature. None of that would have happened if her mom and I had decided her frog drawing was a waste of time and made her stop.
That doesn’t mean every activity that looks like messing around is worth leaving alone, of course. The two-step check I use is really low-effort, and it works for me almost every time. First, pause for two full minutes before you interrupt – don’t say anything, just watch what they’re actually doing. A lot of times, what looks like mindless staring is actually them thinking through a problem, and what looks like repetitive building is them testing balance or tweaking small changes they didn’t nail the first time. Second, ask that one simple question: “What’s the hardest part of what you’re doing right now?” If they can answer you, even if it’s a silly, small thing, they’re engaged and learning, even if it doesn’t look like it. If they shrug and say “I don’t know, I’m bored,” then you can suggest switching to something else.
Last weekend, I messed up anyway. I saw Leo stacking the same 10 plastic cups over and over on the counter while I cleaned up dinner, and I interrupted him to practice his spelling words for the quiz on Monday. He huffed through the 10 words, got all of them wrong anyway because he was mad, and later I found out he was trying to stack them higher than he had the day before, trying to beat his own record. I traded 10 minutes of his quiet problem-solving for 10 minutes of grumpy, unhelpful spelling practice. That’s on me.
Today, Leo finished his cat with the perfect shadow under the paw. He showed me, and it looks really good. He said tomorrow he’s drawing the same cat again, but this time he’s adding a little red bow tie around its neck. I didn’t suggest he draw a dog or a tree house or anything new. I just said that sounds cool, and went back to grading my papers.
I still have that voice in the back of my head some days, reminding me that we don’t have a lot of free time after school and on weekends, that we should be filling it with tutoring and sports and educational activities and all the things everyone says we should be doing. It’s still a work in progress. But I’m trying harder to stop asking if something is a waste of time just because it doesn’t look like my idea of productive. Most of the time, the kids know what they’re doing more than we give them credit for.
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