Is it time to assess how homework is going in your house? Is it still a nightly tug of war – or have you had some success in handing off responsibility and prioritizing your child’s use of out-of-school time?
Do you feel like homework is having a negative impact on your relationship with your child?
What are the needs of the situation?
Assess the educational benefits of the work he is being asked to do. What would really happen if she didn’t do her homework? Would her schoolwork suffer? Would his grades suffer because of the failure to turn it in or because of the missed opportunity to review the material? Read Alfie Kohn’s The Myth of Homework to consider other perspectives.
Talk to your child’s teachers to be sure you understand their homework policy. What is the teacher’s goal with the homework? What happens if no homework is done? What happens if it is incomplete? How is homework helping your child learn the material?
Assess what is getting in your child’s way of completing homework – okay, I bet you’ve thought about this for hours. She just hates doing it, he has other things he really wants to do, it’s tedious and discouraging, she says no one really looks at it, he says he doesn’t learn anything from it, she says she doesn’t care about college… Sit down with a school counselor and get another perspective. Is the homework serving an educational purpose? How can you advocate for your child so that she is being helped by homework and not just frustrated or tormented?
How can you change your role?
Take a timeout from the role of enforcer. Ask someone else to spend time supervising your child with homework: grandparent, hire a local teenager to come in, hire a tutor (depending on the age of your child and the subjects that are causing the most difficulty). Ask your child what would happen if for 6 weeks you said nothing about homework. Does he or she want the responsibility? If the grades suffer would your child care? Rotate the job with your spouse, every other week.
Have a family routine that limits homework time and creates shared time for fun activities. Make sure you find ways to get involved in your child’s interests. Read the sports page, listen to rap music, play the video games, get your own facebook page – whatever they love develop a knowledge and capacity to share. You do need to be careful to respect their privacy. This concept looks different for an 8 year old and a 13 year old.
Look at your long range goals for your child. Do they share your dreams? How will you feel and what will you do if your child takes a different path? What is your worst case scenario and how would you deal with it? Consider different paths to the same goal: who do you know that found a successful career after floating around aimlessly for years?