Homework Help Hell

Helping your child with homework is as American as motherhood and apple pie. Unfortunately, homework help often turns out to resemble the war in Iraq more than a pleasant family tutoring experience.  Helping your child with homework goes awry because of a series of misunderstandings about what homework is all about and what goes wrong in tutoring. 

The first thing to understand about homework is that much more is involved than just solving math problems or learning spelling lists. If it has turned into Homework Help Hell, it has become an unpleasant emotional experience for both parents and child.  As obvious as this emotional arousal is, its impact on homework tutoring is little understood and seldom effectively addressed. Until the emotional component of homework help, and for that matter school work, is resolved the tutoring can be very trying and progress may be more backwards than forwards, particularly for the ADHD child.

Emotional intensity in homework help tutoring

Kid feelings – boredom, frustration, anger, withdrawal

What parents miss about homework help is that it is a lot more than just getting tonight’s math or spelling done.  It is the culmination of a long chain of learning experiences about how to cope with success and failure in these tasks.  And of course, if homework help has become a problem, the child has experienced a chain of failure, frustration, anger, boredom and agitation laden learning experiences rather than success. This greatly compounds the child’s learning and the parents tutoring task. Not only does he have to complete the current math problems, but he also has to manage negative feelings aroused by past assignments that are similar to the current tutoring.  

There are two approaches to coping with these noxious homework help feelings. The child can either try to control the bad feelings or try to avoid them by diverting their attention away from the task. Neither approach works very well.

The emotional barriers to learning

Emotions have a powerful influence on our ability to learn. When we are interested and excited about something, we can learn easily. However, if we find the target of our learning frustrating, boring, upsetting, threatening, depressing or otherwise unhappy, learning becomes almost an impossible problem. These emotions not only distract us from the task to be learned, but also use up the attention that we need for learning. Attention is an extremely limited mental resource. We can use it either for experiencing emotions, controlling those emotions or learning, but not all three. There is just not enough to go around.

Emotional arousal uses up attention, and attempts to control these emotions uses up even more attention. It becomes mental isometrics between expression and control of the feelings. During this struggle, there is very little attention left over for  homework help. The result can be ADHD. Unfortunately most attempts at tutoring children in their homework exacerbate these mental isometrics. Point systems, timeout, punishment, reading help, math help, tutoring, scolding are often tried as means to motivate the child to overpower these bad feelings. Though these strategies may get behavioral compliance, often the child does not have enough free attention left to effectively participate in the tutoring or homework help.

When behavioral strategies do not work then parents often resort to chemical augmentation of attention to win the mental isometric battle the ADHD child is caught in. Typical drugs used are stimulants such as Ritalin, Strattera, Metadate, Adderall or Concerta. These approaches can be temporarily successful, though the child's nervous system often adapts rather quickly to these medications. Thus, they have to be repeatedly increased over time to continue to help tutoring, homework and school work.

The bottom line is that the powerful emotions elicited are not easily subdued with a behavioral or chemical frontal assault. This generally does not deter those in authority from continuing to do the same tutoring and homework help strategies over and over whether these tutoring approaches are effective for homework help or not.

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