How much help is appropriate? What kind of help should I offer? What do I do when my child doesn’t get his/her homework finished? These are just a few of the many concerns parents have voiced with regards to their involvement with their children’s homework. I’ve raised 3 high achieving children through sixth grade and up and taught public school for 17 years. The following commentary articulates the advice I’ve offered to many parents of students in my classes over the years.

Don’t get too involved with the process. Your child needs to learn independence, responsibility, and perseverance in the face of difficulty. The only way these lessons are assimilated into a person’s life is via life experience. When a parent does too much for a child, that child learns to be dependent and irresponsible. Let me give a few examples of what I don’t do to help my personal children as well as those in my classroom. I will also offer alternatives to these “no-no’s.”

First, avoid helping your child when she first requests it. Since your child will learn the most through her trials, let her struggle. Otherwise, you’ll be helping her every single time she gets stuck for years to come, even when she can’t pay her electricity bill at age 50. Instead, look carefully at the problem and then look into your child’s eyes and declare, “This problem looks a little tricky. With a little more work, I’m sure you’ll come up with the answer. Don’t give up!”

Next, when you feel you must help, don’t ever help a child to get an answer to the exact problem he is stuck on. Instead demonstrate how you would get the answer to a similar problem. For example, if he doesn’t know how to find the predicate in a sentence, show him how to find the predicate in another sentence. Or better yet, hold a discussion around another problem that he has already completed correctly. Mostly ask questions like, “How did you get this answer?” or “Why do you feel confident this answer is correct?” If he is still completely lost, share your own thinking on why the answer is correct and how your brain figured it out. It’ s the process you wish to teach, not the correct answer.

Keep a couple of things in mind at this point. First, it’s ok if your child doesn’t get a score of 100% on every homework assignment. Next, if you help your child too much on his homework, the teacher will not have an accurate view of your child’s skills. This will result in teachers making poor educational decisions since their feedback is inaccurate. Perhaps your child doesn’t belong in the math group receiving that particular homework assignment. It may be far too difficult. By letting him struggle and periodically fall, the perceptive teacher will adjust the assignments accordingly so that your child is challenged at an appropriate level.

Finally, I stay away from directly commanding my children when and where they must complete their homework. I leave that mainly up to them. However, I do offer advice, suggestions, and personal stories of my own victories and struggles with regard to completing necessary tasks. For example, if my son is trying to do his homework in the same room as his brother is playing video games, I might interject something like, “That must be hard to do your homework with all those distractions. Maybe it would be easier if you did your homework in your room and then you could come down and really enjoy these video games. You’d probably finish faster, too!” This type of strategy only works if you include the following component in your overall plan.

Get real involved with the end results. What your child needs from you is motivation to succeed. Most kids don’t have the inner drive to do well in school, get good grades, etc. They need a more mature person to get involved, someone who can look past the immediate desires of childhood and give proper rewards and consequences to build good lifelong habits. It’s fairly simple. First, you need a communication system in place with your child’s teacher. For students who really struggle, this must occur daily. For others, weekly communication may be sufficient. A communication system can be as effortless as having the teacher sign a paper if all homework is complete. Secondly, you, the parent, need to ask to see that communication when expected. If your child does not have it, you must treat the situation as equal with a bad or incomplete mark. Otherwise your child will learn that if she didn’t earn a good mark, she might as well just accidentally “lose” the paper or “forget” to get it signed. Lastly, you need to reward or penalize your child using a pre-established system that is fair, consistent, and short-term.

Here’s a scenario to help clarify this parent/teacher communication system. Tracy is struggling getting all homework finished nightly. The teacher agrees to initial a box each night on a 3X5 card indicating that Tracy has finished all homework. On Tuesday, Tracy brings the card home with a signature in the Monday night homework box. Tracy’s mom asks for the card in the evening just before dinner. After seeing the initials indicating complete homework, Tracy’s mom gives her a big hug and asks Tracy to explain how she did it? She then informs Tracy that she will be able to have dessert after dinner as they had agreed earlier. On Wednesday evening, Tracy shows her mom the card which contains no signature. Tracy’s mom frowns and says, “Oh no! That’s too bad. What happened?” Tracy gives a lame excuse for why she didn’t finish all of her homework. Tracy and her mom discuss ways to solve the problem in the future. Tracy’s mom then reminds her that she will not be watching any TV that night and will have to go to bed at 8:30 instead of 9:00. On Thursday evening, when Tracy’s mom asks to see the card, Tracy explains that she forgot it at school. At this point, the same scene plays out that took place on Wednesday evening.

Notice that Tracy’s mom doesn’t need to yell at, berate, or lecture her. Tracy’s mom can be on Tracy’s side, her partner in trying to achieve the desired results and obtain the reward rather than suffer the consequences. Also, note that the consequence is not long-term. Tracy did not get put on restriction for a month or even a week when she didn’t complete her homework. Parents that resort to this type of consequence frustrate the child. There is no incentive for the child to improve and change the inappropriate behavior when his fate is already sealed for the next night, the night after that, and so on. Lastly note how the parent treated the situation when the child “forgot” the card at school. If the parent responded by saying, “Well don’t forget it tomorrow,” and did not dole out a consequence, then the child may decide it’s a good deal to “forget” the card at school and make a regular habit of it.

Adults who deal out rewards and consequences for children train kids who have good habits. Good habits, like bad ones, are hard to break. Once a child is “trained up in the way he should go,” the rewards and consequences are no longer necessary. “When he is old, he will not depart” from those habits. Success with homework is one good habit that’s worth starting.

Excerpt from Classroom Instruction that Works, by Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock:
“…even though there is certainly a practical (and ethical) limit to the amount of homework that should be assigned to students at the high school level, the more homework students do, the better their achievement. Specifically, Keith’s data indicate that for about every 30 minutes of “additional” homework a student does per night, his or her overall grade point average increases about half a point. This means that if a student with a GPA of 2.00 increases the amount of homework she does by 30 minutes per night, her GPA will rise to 2.50.”

With regard to parent involvement in this homework, the authors also state:
“Parent involvement in homework should be kept to a minimum. It is probably safe to say that many parents assume that they should help their children with homework. In fact, some districts have written homework policies articulating how parents should be involved (Roderique, Pulloway, Cumblad, & Epstein, 1994). While it is certainly legitimate to inform parents of the homework assigned to their children, it does not seem advisable to have parents help their children with homework. Specifically, many studies show minimal and even somewhat negative effects when parents are asked to help children with homework (see Balli, 1998; Balli, Demo, & Wedman, 1998; Balli, Wedman, & Demo 1997; Perkins & Milgram, 1996). Parents should be careful…not to solve content problems for students.”

Tim Bedley teaches third grade in Wildomar, California and trains teachers in classroom management and effective teaching practices.

©2005 Tim Bedley