For older students, that two-hour national average probably includes two ends of a bell curve: none or very little, and “tons.” When researchers asked 4,317 students from ten high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities to describe the impact of homework on their lives, those students reported averaging just over three hours of homework nightly. (They added comments like: “There’s never a break. Never.”) More than three is a whole lot more than two hours (and that was the average, meaning that some children were finding themselves sitting down, as my own high school sophomore son, once that pencil-twirling second grader, now does, for four to five hours some nights).
Whether it’s some homework, more homework, or piles, the homework that causes stress for students also causes us stress as parents. One small study found that stress and tension for families (as reported by the parents) increased most when parents perceived themselves as unable to help with the homework, when the child disliked doing the homework, and when the homework caused arguments, either between the child and adults or among the adults in the household.
In my own research, homework appears among the top four of anecdotally reported stress points for parents, and in our survey, we found that reporting higher rates of homework seems to nip away at our feelings of satisfaction as parents, and even more so if we’re reporting regular arguments with our children about it. When our children are younger, all that homework (again, especially if we’re fighting about it) also makes us feel less effective as parents. The more homework our younger children have, the less in control we feel over the situation and that makes us less happy.
For many of us, homework is the first point of conflict with our children when we see them after school and work, and the last point before they (or we) head off to bed. Do they have any? How much? When are they going to do it? Can they get it done before practice/rehearsal/dinner? After? When is it due? When did they start it? How long will it take? Even parents who are wholly hands-off about the homework itself still need to know how much, when, and how long if there are any family plans in the offing. We can’t plan anything, start anything, schedule anything, without keeping homework fully in mind.
How to Get Happier, Homework and All
Getting past the homework barrier on the way to a happier family is complicated, because the things you can change aren’t easy to change, and the things you can’t change can be particularly hard to live with. There are three major potential trouble spots when it comes to homework.
First, and arguably easiest to change, is your approach to the homework as a parent. We tend to want to focus on the grades and the results, but the homework that goes out of the house is far less important than the homework that’s coming in and what happens when it gets there. When our involvement with that is out of balance, it contributes to our unhappiness.
Next, there’s how your child approaches the homework. If your own approach to homework is out of whack, these two things are probably deeply intertwined, but it is (and should be) a separate question. Teaching your child to manage her homework herself in a positive and productive way is part of your job as a parent.
But even if you achieve homework nirvana on the first two fronts, another potential roadblock looms: the homework itself. The homework your child is getting might not be working for your child and family for various reasons. It could be too much or too little (common when a school is trying to learn to work with a child’s learning challenges). It could be unclear or dramatically different from what your child expected when she signed up for a class. It could just be a poor fit for your kid right now. If any of those things are the case, you, and your child, have a stark choice. You can work toward change (knowing that it may never happen) or you can learn to live within a difficult situation for a year or more.
Our Attitude Toward Homework
The simplest change you can make around homework to increase your own happiness is, of course, to change how you feel about it. Without being utterly heartless, one thing is simply true: it’s not your homework. You could, legitimately, fully disengage. You could walk out of the room when homework appeared and explain to your children that you are out of the homework business. If the result was that no homework was done, and the school complained, you could respond by saying that you will fully support the school in any discipline it chooses to impose for the failure to do homework, but you are going to keep your family focus on other things.
You probably won’t, but you could. (Even if you did, as long as you’re in the house when homework is happening, you’re still going to get caught up in the drama.) Just considering the possibility, though, should open you to this proposal: your children’s homework should not, as a rule, make you unhappy. Even if it’s hard. Even if they’re frustrated or miserable. Even if the whole things seems grossly unfair and mismanaged. It’s okay to be happy when your children aren’t. You can do whatever you’re going to do to help them through their struggle without getting dragged into the stress.
If that feels impossible, you’re not alone. Janet Rotter, head of the Studio School in Manhattan, has spent more than forty years in education, and she has watched homework evolve. “Homework has become this end-all and be-all,” she says, “sometimes even coming before schoolwork itself. People—adults—will say to you, ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly see you this weekend. We have a lot of homework to do.’”
“It used to be between the child and the school,” she says, but now she sees teachers putting “a lot of pressure on parents to help kids do it.” That, as you probably expect, is not Rotter’s way. The Studio School puts the onus on the children entirely to manage their school and homework lives, from being the ones to call and explain an illness or absence to taking control of what supplies they need and asking their parents to help them get them. Instead of expecting parents to involve themselves nightly, this school asks the parents to get out of their children’s way.
That, says Rotter, is a difficult transition for many parents. “We have these fantasies of what’s going to happen if the homework doesn’t get done,” she says. “The child will get in trouble. The teacher will be mad at him. She’ll be mad at me. She’ll think I’m a terrible mother.”
Those, she says, are thoughts you have to let go. “Homework is a vehicle for helping children learn how to do work away from the teacher without someone making sure they did it.” Instead of being “the homework police,” she asks parents not to remind their children but to ask, instead, what the children think they can do to help themselves remember. “It’s really about what you do when you don’t want to do something, about giving up pleasure,” she says of the child and homework. “They have to learn how to learn, and we have to really let the process unfold.”
Our job as parents, she says, is to (brace yourself) “teach the children that not everything revolves around their homework. There is more to life. We as parents don’t base our worth on whether or not that homework gets done.”
When it comes to school and homework, we parents have become confused about the goal. We think we want our children to “achieve” and “succeed”—but those are the wrong verbs. They’re too easy for us to take over and run with.
Instead, our children need to learn to achieve and succeed themselves. Think of it like basketball. The goal of the game isn’t getting a ball through a hoop. If it was, we could get a ladder, or lower the hoop, and then all go out for ice cream. But no, the goal is to learn to get the ball through the hoop as best as a player can and to figure out where you belong on a team, how to follow the rules, and even ultimately whether you really want to be on the court. Without those things, there is no game.
If we’re too emotionally involved in our children’s school and homework, we make ourselves and our children suffer. Suddenly, what’s important isn’t our family, our relationship, or who we are together and separately but what’s in this one essay or on that report card. Most of us pre
fer to believe that the pressure around homework for our children, which makes us all unhappy, is external. It comes from the school, from society, from the college application process.
Too often, according to our older children, we’re wrong. In the study of 4,317 students from ten high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities, researchers invited students to answer open-ended questions about homework and stress (as well as complete a survey). Although the schools they attended were responsible for the homework loads they faced, many said the real pressure came from their parents, and a perpetual message that if they didn’t do the homework perfectly, they wouldn’t get the grades and they wouldn’t succeed.
Jessica Wolf has been one of those parents. The mother of a high school junior and a college senior has seen a lot of kids through the college admissions process as a college essay coach in Montclair, New Jersey. She wants to “consciously dial back on the freneticism” around the process with her younger son after her relationship with his older brother suffered during high school, so she doesn’t look at the grade portal (an online tool that allows parents to see a daily progress in classes). She lets her son tell her what he wants to tell her and reminds him that, if he needs help, she has his back.
“It’s very, very difficult,” she says, to stay hands-off. Hers isn’t a community where parents take a backseat on schoolwork. “I was at a dinner, years ago, with a bunch of other women, and I guess we all had kids in the same class. At eight thirty they all got up, and one said, ‘I’ve got to get home; my kid has a paper due,’ and everyone was like, ‘Yep.’ I remember one saying, ‘I’m practically going to have to write this myself.’”
“For some parents, that’s all they talk about, that’s all they worry about,” says Rotter. “They act as if the homework is more important than the child.” Denise Pope, a senior lecturer in education at Stanford University and one of the researchers who led the study described above, suggests that those parents might be falling into the “trap of parent peer pressure” that Jessica Wolf describes. “It’s really up to us to say the opposite.” Pope advocates spending the time you might otherwise spend on nagging about grades talking about other aspects of life and being a voice of reason, especially if your child is a perfectionist or is discouraged—and even if she seems fine.
Grades aren’t permanent. Success isn’t permanent. Failure isn’t permanent. Some people march straight through high school, college, and graduate school. Others take different paths. Don’t just highlight one route in life and make sure that even a child who’s driving herself hard toward socially accepted “success” knows (as you do) that there are many roads to happiness.
How Your Kid Does the Homework
It is very, very hard to be happy while one of your children is clutching your leg while you try to make dinner, forcing you to drag her around the kitchen while she wails, “I can’t do it! I need help!”
Trust me, I know.
Ordinarily, it’s a truism that the only person we can change is ourselves. In this case, though, it’s our job to teach our kids not how to do the homework itself—as in, how to add and subtract or write a summarizing paragraph—but how to get the homework done without our being a regular part of the routine.
It’s important to be clear on the goal with homework. Don’t think “getting it done well,” think “becoming capable of getting it done well without help.” That can be tough. It’s easier to help get it done (especially if your child is begging for help, or the kind of “help” where someone else does all the work) than it is to say “I know you can do this,” and let them do it, even if it takes a while, and even if initial results are far from perfect. What you want now isn’t always what you want later.
When your child understands that the responsibility for the homework is his, you’ll be much more able to be happy and at ease during his regular homework times, and not just because, “Hey! You don’t have any homework!” If the expectation is that you will be deeply involved in the process, from getting him to sit down with your endless nagging to rushing to the rescue in the event of a compound fraction to checking the work to make sure that it’s done, done right, and packed up and ready for school, then your child can take all his negative energy around homework and dump it right on you.
Suddenly, it’s your fault he has to do it. It’s your fault if it’s hard, or if he’s not doing it well, and it’s your fault if it’s not done or forgotten. Not only is he failing to learn much, if anything, from the homework process, but you’re the bad guy. This isn’t going to make you happy now, and it isn’t going to lead to greater happiness later.
It’s never too late to straighten out who is at the helm (your child, in case there was any confusion) when it comes to getting the work done. Here’s the message we want them to soak in:
You’re learning. It’s okay to make mistakes while you’re learning. That’s how you improve.
It’s less work in the long run to try your hardest.
That doesn’t mean it has to be perfect.
Your best work is good enough.
If you’ve sat next to your child and helped the homework happen in the past, lay it out: “You’re in second/fifth/tenth grade now—you sit down and start working, and I’ll be nearby if you need help.” You want to send a message of expectation and belief in your child’s competence and ability. “Take an interest,” said Julie Lythcott-Haims, when they ask for help. “You can help them interpret instructions, you can help them procure materials, but when they’re turning to you and saying, ‘I can’t, I don’t know,’ you have to say, ‘Yes, you can. This is the homework assigned. Your teacher thinks you can do it, and I do, too.’”
This is true of daily work, and it’s true of the kinds of big assignments that have many parents whipping out the glue guns. Helping your child learn to do a big project (as opposed to creating a successful project) doesn’t mean leaving a second grader to do her own Web search on “penguin mating.” (This is, in fact, a very bad idea.) You can help make a plan, teach techniques that make presenting easier, and troubleshoot when, say, the papier-mâché scale model of Epcot’s Spaceship Earth proves too heavy for the proposed drinking-straw base. The goal is finding the line between supporting and doing, and staying firmly on the cheerleader side in all things school-related, whether it’s student council election posters or long division.
This will not necessarily be a fast process. I don’t mean to make light of how challenging that change may be for your child and, by extension, you. One of my children has struggled with school; she doesn’t believe her best is good enough because, for so long, her best was so often objectively wrong in terms of calculation, spelling, or grammar. She’s a hard worker and she likes to get her work right, so she would prefer a holding hand. We endured the “but I need help” tantrums for years, and in many cases, we got her help, in the form of a tutor or additional time with the teacher after school, but we didn’t give her the help ourselves—because when we did, we became either the bad guy (forcing her to sit there and work hard while she grew angrier and angrier) or the patsy (explaining every step of the way until there was nothing for her to do but hold the pencil).
If that first night of math homework without your help takes your sixth grader three hours, sit tight. What took three hours the first time might take two next week and half an hour the week after that. If it doesn’t change—if your child is truly struggling without your help—then you’ve both learned something valuable that’s far better learned now than later: something needs to change. Maybe that’s the homework or the class. Maybe your child needs additional help (but not the kind that masks whether she can understand the material). Maybe she’s in the wrong class. It really is better to be able to follow, understand, and do well in grade-level math than to be constantly out of one’s depth just because one’s parent or older sibling was always in the advanced class.
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With most children, you can help a little (“quarter” means “fourth”) and step away, but with others, there’s no such thing as a little help. For us, even the slightest indication that we might involve ourselves in our daughter’s homework, like a willingness to spell a word, sent us spiraling back to the beginning, with her refusing to do anything without one of us sitting by her side. That meant we had to be absolute in our refusal to help (and whenever we had guests of any kind, it meant they thought we were somewhere between crazy and cruel). If you’re in a similar situation, you’ll need to spend some time being absolutely hands-off (and by “some time,” I might mean years).
That’s okay. It’s fine to send a child to school with homework that’s incomplete or done wrong—in fact, it’s what you’re supposed to do. Too often, homework is useless from an evaluation perspective, says Doreen Esposito, the principal of PS 290, a K–5 school in Manhattan. “Many times, parents are doing it for them, or tutors are doing it with them.” Teachers, she says, need to know where their students are independently. Letting the homework go back in the backpack without your eyes first helps them do just that, even if you happen to have noticed a problem. If you see something, don’t always say something.
But what if the homework is graded, and what if those grades matter? Here’s another ticklish spot. In most of the country, nothing about a child’s marks has any lasting impact until ninth grade. That means it’s easier for most of us to let the chips of various homework failures fall where they may.
How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute Page 14