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HOMEWORK: MORE FUN WHEN IT’S NOT YOURS

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Our family’s homework travails began when my oldest son changed schools for second grade. In his old school, he had no homework; in the new one, he had some—one worksheet of math problems a few nights a week, and a weekly spelling list and test. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than ten minutes of homework per grade per night, and he should easily have been able to complete the work within that time.

He couldn’t. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do the work. He just . . . didn’t. He twirled his pencil. He balanced his chair on two legs. He gazed into the distance, contemplating the specks of dust glistening and drifting in the sunlight of the window. He didn’t complain or even seem particularly unhappy (and he did not then, and does not now, have attention issues). He sat there, pencil in hand, work on the table, and did other things. Leave him alone, and later, you’d find him on the floor under the chair, zooming the pencil around airplane style. Sit with him, and he’d engage you in constant, non-homework-related conversation about the pencil, the dust, the view out the window, the political situation as he understood it.

If this sounds rather charming, it was (now in high school, he’s still charming). It did not, however, get the job done, and that didn’t make anyone happy. We consulted the teacher, set timers, adjusted the workload, found ways to direct his attention back to the task at hand, but he didn’t change much. In third grade, the work increased (slightly) and so did the time he spent with it. Not on it, because for at least 50 percent of the time he and his homework spent together, no one could say he was “doing” homework. It drove us crazy. Why could he not just zip through the math problems, which were nothing he couldn’t easily do, copy the spelling words or whatever, and be done so he could do something else?

Meanwhile, the parents around us were having different homework struggles. Perfectionist children who couldn’t be persuaded that they’d done enough on their State Fair poster by midnight, frustrated tantrums over fractions, twins in different classrooms with entirely different homework loads, family dinners ruined, and younger siblings tugging and distracting parents trying to help struggling older kids. Then there was the mother of one child’s classmate who would call to see if she could pick up our child to come play.

“After homework,” I’d say.

“What homework?” she’d ask. According to her kid, there never was any.

All of this added up to substantial amounts of misery for everyone involved—and our pencil-twirling oldest turned out to be a piece of cake in comparison to one of his younger siblings. Homework was hard on everyone.

Surely, somewhere, there were children who went home, did their homework without comment, and turned it in the next day—or children who were blissfully homework free. If that’s the case in your family, you can skip this chapter (or save it for later). Homework isn’t a universal problem, but when it’s a problem, it feels overwhelming. Some parents described teachers complaining about the homework. It was undone, poorly done, not turned in, not up to potential. Then there were the parents who were complaining right back. Homework was stressful, homework interfered with play and family time. Children were too worried about homework, or too confused, or needed help but then insisted their parents were “not doing it right.”

Is there any way to salvage some parent and family happiness out of this? Because in general, parents, students, siblings, and even, I soon learned, many teachers are united in one belief: homework sucks.

What Goes Wrong

Our homework didn’t make our parents’ lives miserable. In many cases, it barely appeared on their radar. Those of us who finished school at the end of the twentieth century can look at our own children and see their time in school as similar to our own, in classrooms where boys and girls are at least nominally equal and college is often the goal. For many of our parents, that wasn’t the case. Their high school experience was very different from ours. Most of our mothers weren’t necessarily expected to excel in rigorous subjects, and they might not have been expected to go to college at all. High school, as an institution, evolved very rapidly. Unless they were from wealthy families, their parents (our grandparents) were probably the first children in their families to even attend high school, and not finishing wasn’t unusual. In 1910, just 9 percent of the population graduated from high school; by 1940, that percentage had increased to just over 50 percent.

That democratization of secondary education was uniquely American. Immigrant parents would have had even less experience with the classes, activities, and homework that were becoming a standard part of adolescence here, let alone with the process of applying to colleges that follows. So for generations, instead of shepherding a child through a familiar experience, parents either struggled with what it means to raise a child with a new set of expectations or stepped back and let those children handle it. Hovering over homework, or school in general, wasn’t part of the picture.

But when our generation of parents sees our children embarking on the path from kindergarten and beyond, we’re seeing a process we know intimately, and we want to help. Oddly, though, much of our “help” is less than helpful. Both individually and as a society, we’ve upped the ante for upper- and middle-class kids by packing their schedules with enriching non-school activities. Our parents didn’t have to concern themselves about whether homework could get done in the limited space between violin, soccer, and Kumon (oh, the irony). We’ve also pushed schools, especially in affluent communities, toward more academic rigor. Kindergarten is no longer just for playtime, and recess along with music and the arts is rapidly disappearing from the lower school schedule. In high school, electives like photography and metal shop lose out to extra academic offerings thought to be more impressive to college admissions officers, and those classes often involve additional homework.

That means that if you suspect your own children have more homework than you once did, you’re probably right. While there’s no evidence of an enormous nationwide increase in homework load, data on two groups of kids suggests a significant uptick: homework for nine-year-olds went from no homework at all to some, and while the national average homework load for high schoolers has hovered at less than two hours a night for decades, students in high-performing (and high-income) schools reported more than three hours. (It’s worth noting that homework itself is not correlated with student performance.)

Those small-sounding changes have made a big difference for many families. If you’re the parent of a nine-year-old, or a younger child who has been assigned to bring in four interesting facts about marmosets, you know that—as we discovered when our oldest hit the homework roadblock for the first time—the difference between “none” and “some” is more than just “significant.” For some children, it’s the end of the world, or you’d think it was, as you watch them rolling around on the floor and screaming in protest over five math problems that could easily be done by now if they’d just get over it.

“No” homework is no homework. “Some” homework can change the family dynamic, turning parents into taskmasters and evenings into stress-filled power struggles, or at the very least demanding accommodation where once there was just free time. Even that’s harder than it sounds if, for example, pick-up from the after-school program is at six p.m., there’s still dinner to be made and eaten, and the assignment is “read and discuss the story of Johnny Appleseed with a parent.”

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 prefer 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:

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.

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.

If your child’s grades matter—if you live in New York City, where students apply to middle schools or charter schools, or are in some other way in a situation where the numbers are going to make a difference—then you probably look at things differently. You’re in a tough spot, right there at the intersection of what’s culturally wrong with homework and how parents are making it worse. Most of us won’t have to deal with the ramifications of a child making mistakes with long-term implications until they’re in high school, when college and adulthood feel closer, children are more competent, and it’s easier to see why they need the freedom to screw up (although not necessarily easier to watch).

On balance, you want your child to do the homework. When you look back and tally things up, nearly everything you teach her around homework (including the things you teach by what you do, not by what you say) should be in service of the larger message: she makes mistakes while learning, does her best, and doesn’t freak out if her best isn’t perfect because she knows it’s good enough.

If sometimes you find yourself in a place where you’re doing more to help than you want to, don’t beat yourself up, but don’t slide further and further along the slope, either. If you can, talk with your child about why you’re more involved and how that can change. This might be a time to go on to the next section and start advocating for homework change—sometimes teachers haven’t fully thought through the implications of a homework grading policy.

How Your Kid Does Homework Now Isn’t Necessarily How She’ll Do It Forever

Every situation is different, and every child is different. Even with the best of intentions, it’s unlikely you’ll quickly find yourself out of a job when it comes to homework—you still need to help them learn how to do their best work efficiently and effectively. So what can you do that helps them move toward that goal? Encourage your child to make some conscious choices around homework instead of doing it “whenever.” Offer help with when and where, not how. Ask things like “When are you planning to get your homework done?” with, you know, bonus information—“You’ve got soccer from four to five and Holly is coming over for dinner.” Especially at the start of the year, let the kid make the choices, then help assess. “Hey, your teacher keeps writing that she can’t read your math homework. Let’s figure out how you could make it neater.” “Hey, you left the homework until after soccer last week and weren’t happy. Maybe a different approach this week?” (I’ve even had my kid record a message to their future self, saying, “Don’t wait until bedtime to do the math!”)

Then let them figure it out, and don’t judge the results. It’s easy to slot your kids into categories when it comes to homework—the organized one, the slacker, the hard worker. But those things don’t always hold true. The organized one will forget something big, the easy-A-maker will fail, the slacker will suddenly get interested. If you haven’t made those roles part of their identity, it’s easier for kids to let themselves see things differently, to get past mistakes if they’ve made them, or to get excited about a new class or project.

People, including children—especially children—change. Kids grow. They evolve. They’re supposed to be learning how to do this stuff—and that doesn’t just mean algebra and the ABCs. They’re learning how to sit down, how to do hard stuff, how to do something they don’t want to do, to plan, to think, to try again.

They learn some of that from homework. That doesn’t mean we have to like homework. We just have to get out of the way and let them do it.

The Homework Itself

Sometimes the homework itself really is the problem, and once in a while, changing that is easy. When my oldest son was in third grade, his school tried out a program that required the children to complete their homework online. There were many problems with this scenario (our dubious rural Internet connection at the time; the trouble it caused with his younger siblings, for whom just touching the keyboard was a coveted privilege), but the largest was that he could not type, and the assignments took him forever. We gave it some time, in the hopes the bugs would be worked out, but after a long night of hunting and pecking to meet the requirement that he copy (by typing them into the particular homework program) sentences including his spelling and vocabulary words, I finally got in touch with the teacher. “Oh,” she said. “It would be fine if you typed the sentences for him.”

“But the assignment is to copy the sentences. That’s the whole assignment.”

“Yes, but it’s fine if you do the typing.”

“If the assignment is to copy the sentences by typing, and I do the typing, whose homework is it?”

To her credit, she laughed. That was the last such assignment, and the homework program itself lasted only a few more weeks. It just wasn’t effective for the kids at that age, and it took parents and teachers working together to figure it out.

It’s rarely that simple. In general, whether you wish there were less homework, or more homework, or different homework, giving things a little time to shake themselves out before you take action is a good plan, especially at the beginning of anything new (and that’s a fine time to work on your and your child’s perspective on homework—it’s homework, and it’s not a matter of life or death).

But what if, after a little time has passed, you feel like the homework is a problem overall? Or what if one assignment, one class, or one teacher has your child (and you) all tied up in knots? It is possible for you, or an older child, to make some changes in homework—sometimes immediately, sometimes in the long run—that might make everyone happier, if you approach it right. But you can’t do that until you understand what the homework is, what it’s for, and who has the power to change it.

What Is This Homework, Really?

The first thing we as parents need to do is assess our child’s experience of the homework against, well, reality. Does sixty-four math problems sound like madness? Ask your child to reach out to a classmate and be sure she got the assignment right before you join her in freaking out. (We once discovered, after much drama, that only the even-numbered problems had been assigned.) Of course it’s crazy that she’s expected to write five researched pages on a given topic by tomorrow morning—but is she sure that this assignment was given out this afternoon? Kids make mistakes. They also procrastinate, and some are prone to adjusting the truth to make themselves look better (at least one of mine frequently “kinda” knew about the reading). And in some cases (as with my pencil twirler) it’s simply taking your child longer than it does anyone else’s.

One more thing to consider as you try to evaluate the work your child has been assigned is whether he’s more capable than you (or he) thinks. That may look like a huge page of math problems, but a kid who has been practicing addition facts in class may be able to knock them out in less than two minutes (in fact, that may be the goal). More complex endeavors may be well within your child’s grasp, perhaps combining the things he has been learning in the classroom in new ways that will stretch and challenge him, but truly are doable—doable, that is, in a manner suited to his age and experience, not yours.

When my two youngest children were in fourth grade, they were assigned to prepare a five-minute-long speech from a biography, to be delivered, not read, from notes on index cards, in costume and in character and with at least one prop. I thought it was impossible, particularly for my daughter, who can have trouble telling the important facts or events in a book from the details. But various circumstances meant that even though we intended to help, we couldn’t.

They did fine—because they were, in fact, ready for this project, and their teacher knew it. Madeline Levine, a clinical psychologist and author, suggests that if, as a parent, you find yourself classifying an assignment as impossible rather than challenging and getting ready to don your superhero cape and leap in, you should stop and look more closely. It may be out of your child’s comfort zone, she said, but if you break it down into chunks, is it within their “capacity zone”?

When kids pull off something that’s a real reach for them, that’s a happiness booster for both of you. If I had helped with my daughter’s report, it would have included much less information about the ponies and horses Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to become a doctor in the United States, owned as a child and maybe a little more about her medical career. But that didn’t matter. The right question isn’t “Can she do this the way I’d do it?” but “Can she do this at all?”

What Is This Homework For?

The goal of that oral book report wasn’t that my child learn the “right” things about Elizabeth Blackwell. It was that she take information from written sources and present it aloud to her classmates. Often, the homework’s objective is pretty simple. For younger children, in math, it’s usually practice. Teachers want those simple facts to become automatic. The same goes for spelling. Sometimes an assignment that seems like busy work, like copying the spelling words out four times each, is an effective, if not particularly inspiring, learning tool.

With projects, book reports, and similar homework, the goal—along with the more obvious educational content—might be learning to manage time or to plan ahead or divide a big project into smaller pieces. Teachers might assign reading to allow the teacher to move faster or to be ready for class discussion.

Understanding what the homework is meant to accomplish can be key to working with a teacher toward an individual, short-term change if it’s one particular kind of homework that’s creating a problem. If, for example, the goal is for a child to read every night but your child spends so much time watching the clock and adding and subtracting minutes that no reading can get done, maybe she could check a box instead of entering a number. If the teacher has asked that you set a timer so that a child can work toward speed on a page of math facts, but your child is made frantic (as one of mine was) by the ticking away of the seconds, maybe she could use an app or flashcards to practice.

You don’t, of course, want to make your child the exception to every rule. Sometimes tests are timed, sometimes homework is no fun. But especially in the lower grades, teachers are often willing to work with parents if a type of work is causing an issue.

Who to Talk to, and What to Say

Oona Hanson, a Los Angeles parent who became interested in homework policies while advocating for her own child, and eventually obtained a master’s degree in educational psychology and became involved in school governance, suggests that regardless of whether you think you’ll be advocating only for your child or seeking larger changes, you start by talking to the teacher about what you’ve observed, not what you think.

“Describe what is happening with your child,” she suggests, and don’t put the teacher on the defensive with phrases like “He loves your class, but . . .” Work from the assumption that you and the teacher both want what’s best for your child, but don’t assume anything else. When she described her daughter’s concerns over a packet of homework that came home every week in kindergarten, the teacher quickly told her not to let the child worry about it. The real goal was just to take something home at the beginning of the week, then bring it back at the end. “She said, ‘She can do as much or as little of the work as she wants.’”

Should you ask around before you approach the teacher? Yes—and no. Tapping a friend whose child is also in the class on the shoulder at a soccer game and starting up a conversation about the homework is great, as is placing a phone call (to another parent or child, not the teacher) to clarify the night’s assignment. A quick spout-off on Facebook, though, is a bad idea. “When parents get on social media and then they start texting each other, everything gets blown out of proportion fast,” says Anita Perry, a former teacher in Devens, Massachusetts. “Suddenly the principal is involved and it’s this big enormous problem,” when reaching out directly to the teacher could have led to a simple resolution.

Similarly, your kitchen table complaints aren’t going unheard, even if you didn’t press “post.” “First and second graders are very honest,” says Perry. “They come in the next day, and they say, ‘Mommy said this homework was stupid and I don’t have to do it.’”

Beth Rabin, a Los Angeles mother of twin daughters now in high school, first contacted a teacher about homework when one, then a fourth grader who normally loved school, began to really be “dragged down” by her homework.

“I observed for nearly two weeks,” she says. “I made sure I had good data, and then I went to her, and I just said, this is what’s happening. This is how long it’s taking.” The teacher’s response was to suggest a reduction in homework in an area (vocabulary) where her daughter already had strong skills. That didn’t eliminate the most challenging parts of the homework, but it did lessen the amount of time spent on it.

Sometimes, teachers genuinely don’t know how long an assignment takes a student or how it plays out in the family. Your suspicion that a younger teacher, particularly one without a family of her own, might not have thought about the homework in the same way as a teacher with more experience or a family does may be correct. One seventh-grade teacher wrote me an email saying that when she first started, at age twenty-one, she never really thought about how homework would impact a family. “My understanding was that I should assign homework every night. I did that until last year, when a parent made me see things differently. I just was following what I thought I ‘should’ do as a ‘rigorous teacher.’ I thought I would get in trouble if I didn’t assign homework each night.”

Years after the fourth-grade homework incident, Beth Rabin realized that each of her twin daughters was spending eight hours a weekend outlining a chapter in a particularly dense textbook for an advanced placement course. Again, she observed, and again, she got in touch with the teacher, this time with a question as well as a description of what was happening. How long should the outlines take? Two hours. Eight hours was indeed a problem. “To her credit,” says Rabin, “the teacher asked around,” and found that some students were able to get it done in two hours, while others were not. Rabin’s daughters and some of their classmates needed to develop more of the skills needed to do the task; the teacher worked with the girls, suggesting strategies for doing the work as well as managing the time involved.

It’s important to remember that the solution may not lead to perfection—Rabin’s daughters still spent more than two hours on that assignment—but it might be enough to reduce a child’s stress and, by extension, your own. Rabin’s daughters are stretching to achieve something that might be easier for some students. Some assignments take some students more time than others; some classes are designed to require more, or more challenging, work at home; sometimes students take on a course load that’s more work than they realized. Sometimes the right course is just to accept the homework and move on to managing it and helping your child find her way to success with it. Sometimes, you’ll want to take your advocacy further.

Most teachers really are receptive to a parent approach about the homework, but some aren’t—and some genuinely aren’t able to make the changes you were hoping for because they’re working within a set curriculum or with a school- or district-wide policy. That means your next stop is with school administrators, and maybe beyond. Principal Doreen Esposito says PS 290 changed its homework policy partly as a result of parent advocacy.

“It started with a concern over inconsistency,” says Esposito. Some teachers in the upper grades gave a lot, others relatively little. At a meeting of the leadership team formed among teachers, administrators, and parents, one parent with experience in the area offered to present the research around homework. He did it, she says, in a non-confrontational way. “What he said was consistent with experiences I had had,” she says. “Some of the homework we sent home seemed to have no purpose, yet parents were fighting with their kids to get it done.”

If some parents weren’t happy, many teachers weren’t happy, either. “Homework is busy work for teachers,” she says. They have to show that they’re looking at it, yet it’s often not useful as a way to evaluate students. “If it isn’t done in class under the right conditions, you don’t really know where they are independently.”

In 2016, the school moved to what they call “home-based learning” rather than “homework”: projects, practice, or curricula designed by students in consultation with their teachers to enhance or deepen their learning. She ticks off a list of the qualities the teachers hope the home-based learning will develop: creativity, curiosity, perseverance, independence, problem-solving, responsibility, collaboration, self-direction. Home-based learning, she says, “allows kids to reflect on their work and create their goals, and to make that connection at home.”

But working toward that kind of big change isn’t easy, and it isn’t fast. Here’s one final thing worth remembering, even if your actions seem to be leading nowhere: sometimes change is gradual, and sometimes we’re contributing to it even if we can’t see it. The parent who brought in the research about the homework did so after his daughter had a particularly difficult fifth-grade year, but by the time the new program was implemented, she had graduated.

And sometimes, after you’ve done everything you’re willing to do, the homework still will be a real pull on your family’s happiness in a way you don’t feel you can tolerate. After four years in a public school with homework expectations that consistently made her son miserable, New York City mom Julie Scelfo moved him (and subsequently his siblings) to a school with a different philosophy. His first school, she says, expected parents to have nightly involvement in the homework, handling things like “grammar and punctuation and spelling” at home, and the homework began in kindergarten with weekly packets and just kept increasing from year to year. Some families would welcome the invitation to be such a big part of a child’s education, but it wasn’t working for Scelfo.

“I was a working parent, with three little kids,” says Scelfo. “I tried to sit with him. I tried to be patient, but I couldn’t always do it.” Then, when her son was in third grade, she found him struggling with an assignment that probably needed her help, “and he hit himself, and he said, ‘I’m so stupid,’ and something just snapped in me,” she says. “I thought, ‘What am I doing, trying to force him into this?’”

At his new school, the expectations around homework are very different, and they fit the family’s lifestyle much better. “The school is really about giving responsibility to children,” she says. “They’re supposed to make the call if they will be absent or late. The school tells parents, stay out of the homework unless the child asks. Don’t say, ‘Did you do it?’ Don’t say, ‘When will you do it?’ Don’t ask if it’s done. They take all those lessons out of the sphere of the parent.”

Your child’s school, and his homework, really do have a big impact on both your and your family’s happiness. If you’re able to put the resources into it—and that’s not a small consideration—finding a way to make a big change in the classroom or the school may be what it takes to make a difference in the homework itself.

Who Should Do the Talking?

So far, we’ve focused on how parents can advocate for our children around homework—but there does come a point when our children should advocate for themselves. They can use time-honored strategies—making an appointment, going to talk to the teacher—but there are also routes open to the young, naive, and enthusiastic that aren’t open to their elders. When my oldest son was in eighth grade, he and a group of friends entered the Verizon App Challenge, which invited students to develop a smartphone app that would help other students. Their app would have allowed teachers to evaluate how much homework was being assigned to a given student overall, rather than focusing on only a single class. As they said in their presentation, “If a teacher says you’ll have half an hour to an hour of homework a night, that sounds reasonable. But if you have six classes, that’s three to six hours of homework.”

Their idea won the state and regional rounds, although it was not one of the two apps selected to be developed in the national competition. The effect on the school of having five of their students win national honors (and a check for the school’s science education department) for an app that attempted to make their homework more manageable, though, was dramatic. My son and his classmates, who graduated that year, only saw a slight benefit. His younger sister is now in the same middle school, with many of the same teachers. Although she’s a very different student, it’s clear that those teachers are making more of an effort to coordinate large assignments and even nightly work.

The big play—creating a committee, doing a large data-gathering project, making a funny video about homework, or even engaging in protest—is an option for kids. But usually, you’re going to need to help them start exactly where you would start—in a meeting with the teacher—whether the problem is that they’re not understanding classroom lectures enough to do the homework, they want to talk about why the homework is what it is and what it’s for, or they just want to convey how challenged they’re feeling.

Helping your child do this is a little different from getting ready to do it yourself. For starters, an email—the first recourse at nearly every age—is unlikely to be an effective tool for children and teens, for one simple reason: it’s too easy. It’s easy for a child to dash off and too easy for a teacher to disregard—or say no.

It’s much harder to look a teacher right in the face, describe a problem, and wait for a response—and this is much more likely to lead to a positive result. Most children need pushing to do this, and some might even want to write down a few notes about what they want to say. If your child is open to it, talk to him about how the teacher might respond, and how he might feel and then respond himself. Children who are really frustrated in a class might fear tears, and that’s understandable. You can practice saying something like “It’s okay that I’m crying; it’s just because I care about this. But we can still talk and figure something out.”

Finally: Sometimes You Will Do Things You Said You Would Not, and That’s Okay

Six or seven years ago, I walked into my friend Suzy’s house to find her seated at her table, surrounded by scissors and construction paper, painstakingly gluing tiny squares onto a piece of poster board. Seated next to her was her nephew, Forrest. Forrest, a high school junior, had moved in with Suzy a few months before. He was a good kid, but he had been living alone with his dad and had struggled in his last high school. He was determined to make a fresh start and get himself into college, and Suzy was determined to help him.

Suzy dotted glue on the back of a tiny square, carefully lowered it onto the paper, and whacked it into place with her palm.

“It’s the stupidest assignment,” she said, dotting glue onto another square. “It’s a roman mosaic or something. He has to glue all these on tonight.” Whack.

Forrest, next to her, was surrounded by books and probably four or five hours of academic work. It was early evening. “I’m just going to get him started, at least,” she said.

Suzy is not particularly artsy. She was having no trouble, as far as I could see, in imitating the work of a teenaged boy. And her younger daughter had been all through elementary school with my oldest son. I knew that while Suzy might help build a set for the holiday concert, she certainly wasn’t sitting at home redesigning her daughter’s second-grade poster biography of Abraham Lincoln. This wasn’t like her, but looking at the books around Forrest, and knowing how hard he was working to succeed in his new, more academic environment, I didn’t have any trouble following one of my mental rules: never judge a parent (or an aunt) whose children are older than yours. Sometimes, you do what you swore you wouldn’t do.

“Sometimes,” though, is an important word. If you’re stepping in on every project, if it worries you that that second-grade biography trifold board “looks like it was made by a seven-year-old,” if you’re stenciling or pasting on backgrounds or using scrapbooking scissors with wavy edges every time the word “project” comes up, then it might be time to begin following the steps for extracting oneself from homework involvement or going cold turkey on anything involving poster board.

But sometimes you’ll do it. Sometimes, you’ll find your sixth grader, who decided the lettering on the traffic safety poster should be white and the entire poster colored around it, sitting there with a marker at eleven p.m., carefully filling in all that space, and you will get a second marker, and you will sit down, and you will help. Sometimes the phone will ring just as you’re sitting down with your laptop or leaving for work, and it will be your child, frantic, who has forgotten one page of the big Emily Dickinson folder she spent all weekend putting together, and it’s a required page, and it will be a slow day and you will have some time and you will drop it off.

And sometimes you won’t. You won’t be home to help color, you’ll be in a meeting when the frantic text about the forgotten page comes through, or you’ll remind both of you that you told her to pack up her backpack last night, and while you are sorry that her rough draft of her Robinson Crusoe essay is on the kitchen counter and now she’s going to have to stay in at recess and rewrite it, these things happen. Sometimes you’ll be able to choose when you help, and sometimes circumstances will choose for you, and it will all work out fine in the end.

Forrest graduated from a small college last spring and is working his first job running construction sites. He’s a lovely, independent young man who doesn’t run to Suzy with small problems or expect her to call his boss for him if he’s late for work, which he wouldn’t be, anyway, because jobs are scarce and this is a good one. Occasionally he brings home his laundry.

As far as I know, he’s never again been asked to make a roman mosaic out of construction paper.