Parents role in doing the homework

Parent helping with homework

Not only is homework help a hellish experience for children, but it is also hell for their parents. In many ways parents suffer worse than children in the battle over completing homework.  It is the parent who feels the pressure to get homework done as a child becomes more and more passive, mentally overloaded and attentionally avoidant.

Many times homework sessions take the form of one or both parents sitting down side by side with the child to do their joint homework.  Parents attempt to use arguments, reasoning, logic, reminding, threatening, pleading etc. to push the child through each step of the homework process.  This is a frustrating and exhausting process that tends to become less effective over time.  Parents work harder and harder as their efforts become less and less effective. Though many parents realize that this approach is becoming less effective, they continue it for lack of a better alternative.

Helping is a very difficult task. If you are not very careful, the more helpful you are the more helpless the child becomes. Many parents have had the experience of working very hard to help by explaining something while there child seems to become less attentive, more passive and non-understanding. The harder the parent works the less the child does. It makes the parent feel very helpless and frustrated. And, less and less is accomplished over time. Too helpful parents can make helpless children.

This is a very frustrating experience for parents and their frustration usually shows. As they get more upset the child resonates with this and also becomes more emotionally aroused. Of course, this arousal reduces the child’s ability to complete homework, which further frustrates the parent. A downward spiraling feedback loop develops in which everyone looses. It turns into Homework Hell for everyone.

After one of these Homework Hell sessions parents often feel guilty, angry, frustrated and hopeless. They may feel caught between the social expectancy that they are supposed to be as supportive and helpful to their child as possible while knowing that this is not working. Wisely, most parents know that they cannot abandon the child, for he or she will surely fail. 

However, some do get misguided advice recommending that the child be left to do their homework on their own and ”suffer the natural consequences of their behavior” if they do not get it done. While this sounds good, most children do not respond well to consequences that are in the far distant future-ie. getting good grades so they can go to college.  They are much more apt to be relieved of the unpleasantness of homework and abandon it altogether.  This is because the failure experience of homework is negative, so it is avoided. Seldom do threats of long term negative consequences rally the child to perform.

This is the same scenario that occurs with adults. An example is the failure of long-term consequences, lung cancer, to rally the smoker to quit, the overweight person to stop eating, the spender to stop spending, etc. For the child, the failure feedback of homework of just adds to their emotional paralysis. Soon parents realize that the child is not going to be rallied by the consequences of failing in school. Rather, the child just becomes more hopeless and frustrated. This “suffer the consequences of their behavior” strategy just creates another failure experience for both parents and child.

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