Child doing homework
Less than an hour to go before my seven-year-old daughter’s bedtime, my home was a long way from being the oasis of calm i was hoping for at that time of d lily had just scribbled all over her homework worksheet, thrown her pencil on the floor and was now yelling at the top of her voice: ‘i hate math. Even if i could persuade her to finish her math homework, lily still had the whole book reading to i was facing two choices –. Game of every parent, i had started out assuming i was simply doing the very best for my child by making sure her work was as good as it could all, what choice did i have? From the very early days in the private nursery she attended, i found myself surrounded by lots of other mothers locked into the same race to make their children the brightest and the lily got older, i came to learn how insidiously contagious pushy parenting one of the mothers spotted another a parent with a kumon math folder, we all rushed to sign up too – for fear our children would get left is underpinned every conversation at the school gates – particularly as all of us were aiming to get our children into a small handful of selective private schools in the by bit, the parenting journey which had started off being so exciting and rewarding, was turning into a stressful game of children are not products to be developed and put on show to reflect well on ing on what happens on the night, every child is conceived with a unique combination of genes which also maps out their strengths, weaknesses and personality traits before they are even may have been bred into a competitive hotbed. But as an innately modest and sensitive child, she decided she did not want to alarm bells started ringing in grade three when, after i personally made sure she turned in the best space project, she won the prize. Even at that young age, no doubt she also realized that the more she succeeded, the more pressure she would be under to keep it the next few years, the issues only problem of not doing , lily started to find excuses for not doing homework. She would barely open her books before yelling: “i’m stuck” –when really she was just terrified of getting it increasing amounts of homework sent home by the school gradually turned our house into a war zone – with me as the drill rk is one of the most common flash points between kids and parents – the crossroads at which academic endeavors meet parental expectations at close quarters – and behind closed s have found that homework is the single biggest source of friction between children and parents. Even that figure seems like a dramatic more and more, it is recognized that homework undermines family time and eats into hours that should be spent on play or leisure. Straightforward piece of work that would take a child twenty minutes at school can easily take four times as long at home with all the distractions and delaying tactics that go with a result, children get less sleep, go to bed later and feel more rk has even started to take over the summer the long break was seen as a chance for children to have adventures, discover themselves and explore nature. Now the summer months are viewed as an extension of the academic year – a chance for kids to catch up… or get ahead with workbooks and ultimately homework abides by the law of diminishing chers at duke university found that after a maximum of two hours of homework, any learning benefits rapidly start to drop off for high school some children will do everything to avoid doing it, at the other extreme others will become perfectionists who have to be persuaded to go to bed. The cloud of anxiety hovering over them, no wonder some of these children perceive education as s fewer parents would go down the path of high performance parenting if they realized how much resentment it creates in their children. The irony is that all this obsession with pushing our kids towards success, pushes away the very people we are trying to all of us would say we love our children no matter what, unfortunately that’s not the message our kids hear. Early signs may be they become uncommunicative after school, stop looking parents in the eye, secretive or we need to remember that unhappy stressed kids don’t the next few years, lily’s insistence on not doing homework kept getting worse. She was becoming defensive and serious of all, by claiming she couldn’t do her homework – when she could – she was testing if my love for her was conditional on her success. Had to face up to the painful truth that unless i took immediate action – and killed off my inner tiger mom – my child and i were growing for the sake of my daughter, i realized i had to change direction and take my foot off the her tutor rang to tell me lily needed a break, i was delighted to agree. I realized i needed to take quite deliberate steps to address that if she was to be happy with herself help her recognize and dismiss the voice that was bringing her down, i took her to see a neuro-linguistic programming coach who teaches children strategies to untangle the persistent negative thoughts that undermine their self-belief – and replace them with positive we began, jenny explained that lily’s issues are not uncommon. As a teacher of 30 years experience, jenny believes the growing pressure on children to perform from an early age is contributing to a general rise in learning anxiety. The youngest child she has helped was ’s children like lily, who don’t relish a contest, who are among the biggest home, some have been made to feel they are not good enough by parents or are intimidated by more academic sisters and brothers. Even when they get good marks, children like lily still dwell on the pupil who got the higher one to support their negative views of their abilities, making it a self-perpetuating downward ’s when children start to see this self-criticism as fact that the negative self-talk can she sat on the sofa, jenny asked lily if she had ever heard a nagging voice in her head that put her down. Gradually the procrastination about homework started to vanish – and lily was much more likely to open her books after school and quietly get on with her have recently come back from a week in a seaside cottage with no internet or phone signal. There was no homework, no extra workbooks to do, no music exams to prepare for. I let the children play upstairs for hours, not on their phones, but in long elaborate role-plays, without feeling the need to interrupt once. Would wager that lily and clio learnt more about themselves – and what they are capable of – in a single week than in a whole semester at their schools where they hardly get a moment to stop and i talk about my journey of being a slow parent, i often find that other parents look shocked – particularly those who firmly believe they are responsible for making their children into the successes they are. So, i shared my journey in the book taming the tiger parent: how to put your child’s well-being first in a competitive course, for the child born with a go-getting personality, teaming up with turbo-charged parents can be a winning combination – to start with at as adults, we have to start asking – how high we can raise the bar before it’s too high for our children to jump?
All, a bigger picture is also emerging: a rise in anxiety disorders, depression and self-harm among children who have grown up with this continual pressure – and the emergence of a generation who believe they are losers if they fail, they’ve never done enough if they among children who succeed in this environment, educationalists are finding pushy parenting creates a drive towards perfectionism which can turn into self-criticism when these young people can’t live up to such high standards. I want to provide a relief from from the fact it makes children happier, it’s also so much more i love the fact that when lily messes around in the kitchen making cupcakes, i no longer have to fight the urge to tell her to hurry up – and badger her to finish her course, not doing homework is not an option – but these days in our house the aim is to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible. And i’m not thinking ‘hurry up with your answer, so we can get on with your homework. Or do they look back on it as a race from one after school activity and homework project to the next? When you say you want your children to be happy, what has that come to mean to you? Ongoing action plan for fine some time sorting through any conflicts related to your kids not doing start with, train your children in good habits and place time limits on how long homework should take from the the school how long a child should spend on each subject at night. Then you can help keep those limits in place by telling kids they can’t spend a minute more – or a minute less – than the allotted the time of the day after school that works best for your child – either straight after arriving home or after a short break. Agree a start time every day so that the rule turns into a routine and there is less room for resistance and ’t finish their homework for kids because you are desperate to get it off the evening’s to-do list. Help them instead to take responsibility for their homework, while you provide guidance from the sidelines on an on-need tanith careyaward-winning parenting writer tanith carey is a mother-of-two who writes books which aim to address the most pressing issues for modern families – and how to build strong, resilient kids in today’s challenging world. Her latest book taming the tiger parent: how to put your child's well-being first in a competitive world has been called a big picture book to ‘re-orientate our parenting’, ‘highly readable’ ‘well-researched’ and ‘ beautifully written’ by teachers, parents and professionals. We are struggling with my daughter doing homework, but it’s more of an adolescent rebellion/lethargy kids attend a montessori school which generally does not assign homework. What homework they tend to get in the elementary levels is a packet of assorted reading and math that they have an entire week to do at whatever pace works for them. But my oldest is in seventh grade and they are trying to transition the kids into what will happen in high school, and my daughter has balked at all the we have never approached our kids’ homework as our responsibility. It’s been much harder clamping down on my oldest and making sure she knows what the homework is and has it ready. Actually worry when i read about other parents monitoring elements of their kids’ lives so much more closely than i do that i’m not doing enough, but my kids are smart and happy and kind and i think they will do fine in the world, so i suppose we will stick with what we are doing. When she comes home, we take a short break, and then she sits down for homework while i get dinner of the days, it happens without any issues. And here, i’ll defer to your wise words, because i can’t say it any better — my [daughter is] smart and happy and kind and i think will do fine in the world, so i suppose we will stick with what we are doing. This piece is not about lily so much as it is about how great it can be when we parents discard our baggage and come to our children afresh. My book taming the tiger parent has been called ‘a book to re-orientate’ parenting – and really it is about one thing: finding empathy and connection with our children without letting the world (which does not always want the best for our kids) to get in the way. But as far as using grades simply as a barometer of whether a child is taking care of responsibilities that seems completely ’s one of the discussions i’m continually having with my daughter at the moment, that she needs to provide evidence for her teachers that she’s done the work. For her, bad grades at a good school are probably worth more than good grades at a bad school, and she will still have more choices than the average child. In my view children should have music as another language – and another outlet for emotion, not just as a way to build said. At that point i was just starting to move away from threats, punishment and screaming, and thought i was doing good by using rewards and positive reinforcement instead, and kohn’s articles turned that notion on it’s eventually started to fall in place when i read the “power of habits” by charles very unsubstantiated, unproven, non-scientific conclusion (which i wrote about here) is based on this observation mentioned in that article — kohn and his colleagues would admit that rewards, bribes and praise do indeed work in the short term — and chales duhigg’s observations that once a habit is formed, you can remove the reward completely from the habit loop and the habit will in my opinion, if you use rewards as a way to establish a habit and not as the end result, they still have a the case of grades for instance, grades are a way to get into a consistent study habit which is — pay attention in class, learn what the teacher is teaching, review at home if necessary, let’s talk about it as much as you want or you can look things up in books/net, apply in a test. Am not a music person (i know, sorry :)) but i would think that using a reward to get a child to practice until the child’s first performance isn’t a bad idea.
Once the child performs in front of an audience, and enjoys that sense of accomplishment, the practice habit will likely carry through, even if you remove whatever temporary reward you used. If the child has an inclination towards music, they will learn to enjoy the practicing part of it too as they go along — it’s just a matter of getting them to do it for long enough to recognize that. But once the system (habit) was established, the marbles (or the things they could buy) is not necessarily a motivator to do the chores… it is “just how things are done” — a simple habit/system that removes the need for verbal negotiation, arguing, reminders, cajoling, power struggles etc from the picture and hence makes what needs to be done tolerable/fun for everyone be honest on music, i think you also know your child is playing the right instrument when they do want to practice. If as a family we were disadvantaged and that status would provide important opportunities my child wouldn’t otherwise get, then sure, that would be a worthy (if distorted) goal. Both writing about it, and reading your’s and tanith’s points of view has been great for me for sorting through what i want/stand for, in terms of grades, homework etc. Words “if as a family we were disadvantaged and that status would provide important opportunities my child wouldn’t otherwise get, then sure, that would be a worthy (if distorted) goal. It converges well with what i have said in my book, the homework trap: how to save the sanity of parents, students and for sharing that, dr. At first i thought, “well, my kid doesn’t really have issues too much with homework . Of course this created a bit of hurt pride and friction about the subject with my husband and i towards the school as we of course thought our child should be in with the other kids. Even now, with a friend’s child being in the other class, there is a pressure for our own child to do better, push harder, get into that class. Not to mention the bragging she’d hear from other kids in that class that made her feel every child is going to be the next einstein and we know our daughter is a smart girl but has a stronger pull, like your lily, toward art and other subjects. Last year it was math that was the issue and now she’s doing very well in math but her language/vocabulary aren’t what they were. She still needs that down time, that play time, enough sleep for certain and a chance to be a kid still, she is one, after have an allotted time for homework and i contact her teacher if something is a problem. Think the biggest eye opener for me were these words from tanith – “for the child born with a go-getting personality, teaming up with turbo-charged parents can be a winning combination – to start with at least. But as adults, we have to start asking – how high we can raise the bar before it’s too high for our children to jump? Have been exploring this point because i believe that one of the unacknowledged knock-on effects of competitive parenting is sibling rows and children don’t just compete to win in the outside world – they do it at home too, leading to many more squabbles and less happy girls lily and clio, for example, have never got on better – they collaborate and help each other with music, homework i hear other parents proudly trumpet how they have children dead set on beating each other as if they was making them excel d is sets up a template that i believe can ruin sibling relationships into r reason to take the foot of the gas…. Show enthusiasm for your child’s interests and encourage her to explore subjects that fascinate her. Hope my answer will help more readers of this is a great article with lots of quality information about handling homework with kids. I’m a tutor, you don’t believe “my kid refuses to do homework assignment. Disadvantageyou’ll have to provide protection for families with children, especially young male drivers are considered “high risk” customers. You should understand is that if your agent as soon reality is that every kid is different and what works for one child may not work for another, even with kids in the same family. When our children were small, our goal was to make the actual work process and homework help as pleasant as possible. Very few children (or adults for that matter) will rise from their chairs when there’s a cat sleeping on their lap. The cat also provides company without interfering with the actual thinking helpful information, my son who is 7 is not the biggest fan of homework.
He acts out, lack of focus, complains that he is tired school year after spring break i had finally had enough, and decided homework would get done on my terms, i wanted my happy go lucky son back, so some nights we did not do homework, knowing that on nights that we did there would be more. Of course, not doing homework is not an option – but these days in our house the aim is to do it as quickly and efficiently as , i have to disagree with you, kids in finland do not do homework and their schools simply gave up giving their students homeworks and nothing happened, finland is still on first levels of education ladders. So it’s optional for everyone , however if it is not optional for you child you can always ask other people for math homework help or chemistry homework article was helpful. While i don’t push my kid to be perfect or ask how other kids did compared to her i constantly get push back from my child with anything she doesn’t want to do. She isn’t a spoiled child and if you took the few things she does have away from her, she is fine with that. If he loves numbers and research, he should welcome what some teachers and families have known for years: that homework at young ages does more harm than here to get time for parents, a roundup of the week’s parenting news that doesn’t feel like ’re currently enmeshed in a high-pressure approach to learning that starts with homework being assigned in kindergarten and even preschool. Homework dominates after-school time in many households and has been dubbed the 21st century’s “new family dinner. A comprehensive review of 180 research studies by duke university psychologist and neuroscientist harris cooper shows homework’s benefits are highly age dependent: high schoolers benefit if the work is under two hours a night, middle schoolers receive a tiny academic boost, and elementary-aged kids? It’s better to you examine the research—not one study, but the full sweep of homework research—it’s clear that homework does have an impact, but it’s not always a good one. That’s bad news, especially for a kindergartener facing 12 more years of more: why you shouldn’t do your child’s en rebel against homework because they have other things they need to do. Children have been told what to do all day long at school—which is mostly sitting still and focusing on the academic side. 116 elementary school made news last year when its principal jane hsu abolished homework and asked families to read instead. Individual schools and teachers from maryland to michigan have done the same, either eliminating homework in the elementary years or making it optional. But schools also report that if teachers don’t give it, some parents will demand ers in homework say it teaches soft skills like responsibility and good study habits. Adults assume the highly undesirable role of homework patrol cop, nagging kids about doing it, and children become experts in procrastination and the habit of complaining until forced to work. Homework comes at a stage when it can academically benefit students, it can also be a student’s responsibility. That means a high school student should be expected to do her homework without being reminded. For a 6-year-old, that means remembering to feed the cat and bring home her we want students to improve memory, focus, creative thinking, test performance and even school behavior, the answer is not more homework, the answer is more sleep. The national sleep foundation reports that our children are suffering sleep deprivation, partly from homework. If we pride ourselves on a rational, research-based approach to education, we must look at the right s often feel stuck with homework because they don’t realize they have a choice. Parents can approach the teacher either about homework load or the simple fact of doing homework at all, especially in elementary school. Opting out, or changing the homework culture of a school brings education control back down to the local ’s another thing the new education secretary has promised: to turn more control for education decisions over to states and local school districts. That could spell good news for students – if local teachers and principals do their own homework and read up on what the research says about making kids do school work after school is red financial up for our up to receive the top stories you need to know now on politics, health, money and ibe today and save up to 84% off the cover up for our up to receive the top stories you need to know now on politics, health, money and homework good for kids? Here's what the research kids return to school, debate is heating up once again over how they should spend their time after they leave the classroom for the no-homework policy of a second-grade teacher in texas went viral last week, earning praise from parents across the country who lament the heavy workload often assigned to young students.
Brandy young told parents she would not formally assign any homework this year, asking students instead to eat dinner with their families, play outside and go to bed the question of how much work children should be doing outside of school remains controversial, and plenty of parents take issue with no-homework policies, worried their kids are losing a potential academic advantage. Here’s what you need to know:For decades, the homework standard has been a “10-minute rule,” which recommends a daily maximum of 10 minutes of homework per grade level. A massachusetts elementary school has announced a no-homework pilot program for the coming school year, lengthening the school day by two hours to provide more in-class instruction. New york city public elementary school implemented a similar policy last year, eliminating traditional homework assignments in favor of family time. The change was quickly met with outrage from some parents, though it earned support from other education solutions and approaches to homework differ by community, and these local debates are complicated by the fact that even education experts disagree about what’s best for most comprehensive research on homework to date comes from a 2006 meta-analysis by duke university psychology professor harris cooper, who found evidence of a positive correlation between homework and student achievement, meaning students who did homework performed better in school. The correlation was stronger for older students—in seventh through 12th grade—than for those in younger grades, for whom there was a weak relationship between homework and ’s analysis focused on how homework impacts academic achievement—test scores, for example. His report noted that homework is also thought to improve study habits, attitudes toward school, self-discipline, inquisitiveness and independent problem solving skills. On the other hand, some studies he examined showed that homework can cause physical and emotional fatigue, fuel negative attitudes about learning and limit leisure time for children. At the end of his analysis, cooper recommended further study of such potential effects of e the weak correlation between homework and performance for young children, cooper argues that a small amount of homework is useful for all students. Second-graders should not be doing two hours of homework each night, he said, but they also shouldn’t be doing no all education experts agree entirely with cooper’s vatterott, an education professor at the university of missouri-st. Louis, supports the “10-minute rule” as a maximum, but she thinks there is not sufficient proof that homework is helpful for students in elementary school. The author of rethinking homework: best practices that support diverse needs, thinks there should be more emphasis on improving the quality of homework tasks, and she supports efforts to eliminate homework for younger kids. I have no concerns about students not starting homework until fourth grade or fifth grade,” she said, noting that while the debate over homework will undoubtedly continue, she has noticed a trend toward limiting, if not eliminating, homework in elementary issue has been debated for decades. The ensuing pressure to be competitive on a global scale, plus the increasingly demanding college admissions process, fueled the practice of assigning homework. Acknowledged that some students really are bringing home too much homework, and their parents are right to be concerned. A good way to think about homework is the way you think about medications or dietary supplements,” he said. Financial up for our up to receive the top stories you need to know now on politics, health, money and ibe today and save up to 84% off the cover up for our up to receive the top stories you need to know now on politics, health, money and homework good for kids? Yes, he replied, explaining that it can help to solidify concepts—but he quickly conceded that some parents weren’t at all happy about debate over elementary school homework is not new, but the tirades against it just keep coming. This fall, the atlantic published a story titled “when homework is useless”; you might have also seen the texas second-grade teacher’s no-homework policy that went viral on facebook around the same time. Research has been unable to prove that homework improves student performances,” the teacher wrote to class , but i had questions. If the issue really is this black-and-white, why do elementary school teachers still assign homework? How much homework are elementary kids getting, how much is too much, and how is “too much” even determined? Homework has only been evaluated through the myopic lens of how it influences academic performance (spoiler: in elementary school, it doesn’t seem to). The upshot, then, is that we really don’t know what homework in elementary school is doing to our kids—but there’s reason to think it can do more harm than good, particularly among disadvantaged , let’s take a close look at the science on how homework affects school performance.
By far the most comprehensive analysis was published in 2006 by duke university neuroscientist and social psychologist harris cooper, author of the battle over homework, and his colleagues. Combing through previous studies, they compared whether homework itself, as well as the amount of homework kids did, correlates with academic achievement (grades as well as scores on standardized tests), finding that for elementary school kids, there is no significant relationship between the two. In other words, elementary kids who do homework fare no better in school than kids who do not. Their analysis did, however, find that homework in middle school and high school correlates with higher achievement but that there is a threshold in middle school: achievement does not continue to increase when kids do more than an hour of homework each night. Kids from low-income families, especially, homework can be a source of doesn’t interpret the elementary school findings to mean that homework at this age is useless. For one thing, he says, we can’t make causal conclusions based on correlational studies, because things like homework and achievement can easily be influenced by other variables, such as student characteristics. If a kid is really struggling in school, he might spend twice as long on his homework compared with other students yet get worse grades. No one would interpret this to mean that the increased time he is spending on homework is causing him to get worse grades, because both outcomes are driven by whatever is giving him academic trouble. Likewise, a really motivated student may be more likely to finish all of his homework and get higher grades, but we wouldn’t say the homework caused him to get better grades if his motivation was the main driver. It’s worth mentioning that cooper’s analysis also included a few small interventional studies that tracked outcomes between kids who had been randomly assigned to receive homework each night and those who had not; these studies did suggest that homework provides benefits, but these studies, cooper and his colleagues noted, “were all flawed in some way that compromised their ability to draw strong causal inference. Are, of course, many other ways that homework could affect a young child—in both good ways and bad. Cooper points out that regular, brief homework assignments might help young kids learn better time management and self-regulation skills, which could help them down the line. Regular homework also lets parents see what their kids are working on and how well they’re doing, which could tip them off to academic problems or disabilities. For a 6-year-old to bring home 10 minutes of homework is almost nothing, but it does get them to sit down and think about it, talk to mom and dad, and so on,” cooper the other hand, homework can also be a source of stress and family tension. For kids from low-income families, especially, homework can be tough because kids may not have a quiet place to work, high-speed internet (or computers for that matter), or parents who are available or knowledgeable enough to help. A 2015 study surveyed parents in providence, rhode island, and found that the less comfortable parents were with their kids’ homework material, the more stress the homework caused at home. I’ve talked to parents—a lot of parents, actually—who feel very burdened by the fact that kids have to do homework at night, and the parents feel responsible for getting it done, and that starts to dominate the home life,” says nancy carlsson-paige, an early-childhood education specialist at lesley university in cambridge, massachusetts, and the author of taking back rk could also take kids away from other enriching activities like music, sports, free play, or family time. It’s sort of an opportunity cost issue,” says etta kralovec, a teacher educator at the university of arizona south and the co-author of the end of homework. One eighth-grader told me that when he was in sixth grade, he had so much homework he couldn’t participate in the sports or music classes he wanted to. Cooper points out, however, that homework could also take the place of television or video games, which might be a good thing (but is yet another complicated topic). There’s the argument that as elementary school has become more rigorous in recent years—a result, many say, of no child left behind and the race to the top fund, both of which made schools much more accountable for low test scores—the last thing overworked, exhausted young students need is more work when they get home. We’re seeing rates of school phobia and unhappiness and angst about school among young children at higher rates than ever before,” says carol burris, a former high school principal who is now the executive director of the nonprofit network for public education. The crux of the problem is that, while all of these points are potentially legitimate, no one has studied how homework affects children’s well-being in general—all we’ve got are those achievement findings, which don’t tell us much of anything for elementary school. This research hasn’t been done, so we don’t other big question—also tough to answer—is how much homework elementary school kids are actually getting.
There are some highly publicized estimates of average homework time derived from a standardized test called the national assessment of educational progress, which is given annually to most american students. It includes the following question for 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old test takers: “how much time did you spend on homework yesterday? Compared over time, the answers suggest that 9-year-olds have more homework today than they used to, but not by a ton. Yet many researchers question the validity of these answers, because, they say, students aren’t typically given much homework the night before a standardized test anyway. And the data from this questionnaire—along with the data from a 2007 metlife survey of third- to 12th-graders that is also frequently quoted as evidence that homework levels remain flat—don’t tell us what’s happening with young elementary school in the 2015 study in providence i mentioned earlier, researchers did attempt to answer this question. They had 1,173 parents fill out a homework-related survey at pediatricians’ offices and found that the homework burden in early grades is quite high: kindergarten and first-grade students do about three times as much homework as is recommended by the “10-minute rule. It’s a standard, adopted by most public schools around the country (more on this later), recommending that students spend roughly 10 times their grade level in minutes on homework each night—so first-graders should be spending 10 minutes on homework and fifth-graders 50. Considering these numbers in combination with their findings on how homework can increase family stress, the researchers concluded, “the disproportionate homework load for k–3 found in our study calls into question whether primary school children are being exposed to a positive learning experience or to a scenario that may promote negative attitudes toward learning. Line is this: you’re the best judge of how homework is affecting your ’s just one study, conducted in one city, so it’s hard to generalize from it; clearly, we need more data. But another national online survey suggests that homework time for the younger grades has been increasing over the past three years. Annual teacher surveys conducted by the university of phoenix reported that in 2013, only 2 percent of elementary teachers assigned more than 10 hours of homework per week. On the bright side, though, several elementary schools in recent months announced that they have stopped assigning homework ’s now revisit that 10-minute rule. When teachers saw cooper’s analysis of the homework data and noticed that the amounts of homework that correlated with the highest achievements in middle school and high school were similar to their rule, they used it as evidence that their rule was appropriate. But here’s the thing: while the 10-minute rule implies that 10 minutes of homework a night per grade is appropriate even starting in elementary school, cooper’s data do not support this a nutshell, then, we don’t have evidence that homework is beneficial for young kids, yet studies suggest that they are doing more homework than even the pro-homework organizations recommend, and the amounts they’re getting also seem to be increasing. So, if you’re a parent of a first-grader who’s getting 30 minutes of homework a night, what should you do? The first thing you should do is talk to the teacher and let the teacher know how long it’s taking the child to do homework,” burris says. Laura bowman, the virginia chapter leader at parents across america, a nonprofit organization for parents who want to strengthen public schools, explains: “i always feel that the initial conversation with the teacher is so important, and at that point a lot of teachers will say, ‘i did not realize how long it was taking, and if it’s going to take your child more than 10 minutes, then just do it for 10 minutes. We want these kids to have a successful experience doing schoolwork on their own in another environment. The parent voice is a powerful one, and we all have to do what’s in the best interest of our own children. Parents across america has a handy toolkit for parents who want to organize other parents around a particular kindergartner spends about 10-15 minutes a week on homework, which is more than my ideal of 0 but not an intolerable amount. You still can’t make headway, you can also tell the teacher that your child simply won’t be doing homework, or won’t be doing more than a certain amount. If this kind of confrontation makes you squeamish, get a letter from a pediatrician or psychologist that says it for line is this: you’re the best judge of how homework is affecting your child. But if your first-grader is struggling for an hour each night, or the homework is taking him away from other activities you feel are more important, take the above steps to remedy the problem. We, as parents, have more power than we realize, and we should not feel ashamed to wield it for the sake of our children.
