Do you "help" your kid with homework?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I see this on TV all the time, and I’m just wondering how common it is for parents to “help” with homework to the point that they do most of the work, or help them so much that they basically give them the answers.

I was responsible for my homework and for preparing myself at school to do the homework. If there was a subject that simply wouldn’t penetrate (cough) math (cough) I would get the equivalent of tutoring from my folks. They’d sit down and attempt to help me understand it so I could do my homework. I never once had “help” on a science project, a book report, a math paper, an English assignment. I was expected to do the work, and if I didn’t…or if I did a shitty job…I dealt with the consequences. I was the same way with my kid.

How do you handle it?

2

Since, according to the “Why? Why? Why?” thread, you and I apparently raised the same kid :), it should not be surprising that I’ve done pretty much what you described.

If he’s trying to find something on teh Internets, I will sometimes help him figure out how to refine his search and will sometimes take a look at a site to figure out if the information is credible.

He’s had a couple of art projects where he needed help finding the materials, but once those were gathered or bought, he was on his own.

“Taking responsibility” has really kicked in this year. He forgot to bring home a book he needed for an assignment, and we said, “Oh, well. You either get on the phone and see if you can borrow it from one of your classmates, or you take a zero on the assignment tomorrow.” He was HUGELY upset and in tears at having forgotten the book, didn’t want to call anyone because he was crying, but, bless him, he sucked it up, made four or five calls, found someone to get the book from, got it and finished his assignment. I was proud of him for toughing his way through his crisis, and I told him so.

3

My father actually taught us separately at home up till we moved to the US because the public schools up in N. Quebec were awful (not to mention 1/2 the time we were in court so my sister and I wouldn’t get pulled out and sent to French school) and my parents didn’t want to send us to boarding school in Montreal at such a young age. He kept us 2 grades ahead of what was generally being taught.

I didn’t find middle school difficult at all (that was when I moved to the US) but my high school was incredibly tough. My father did help me with science and math stuff-but he refused to help us with anything on the homework itself. He would teach us the concepts and make up examples himself, ranging from easy to hard, then let me loose on the homework to do myself.

Also, there’s no reason to give your kids the answers in most math and science textbooks-don’t know what most schools are using but I clearly remember that the books give the answers to the “odd” numbered problems in the back and the evens are without answers. So the teachers would always assign us the “even” numbered sums and if you had trouble and didn’t have a mathy/sciencey person at home, you could look up the explanations to the odd numbered sums, which generally mirrored the even numbered ones closely enough that you could figure out what the method was supposed to be.

I didn’t need help with anything else because I was very gifted at languages. But I’m really happy I let my father “teach” me at home in terms of my weaker subjects, because I passed the Bio, Chem & Physics (low-level) APs and didn’t have to take a single math or science course in college. Since I passed those by myself under proctored conditions, it doesn’t seem like he helped me cheat at all.

4

My wife used to practically do the kids homework for them. I started at the opposite end of the spectrum, being significantly less helpful than I probably should have. We’re approaching equilibrium.

Example 1:
My daughter has chronic math problems, and will frequently say she doesn’t understand some problem or other. I’ll make up different problems & try to explain the concept. When she can solve the problems I’ve made up, I’ll give her the homework problem & say “Now do it.” So, no matter how much we go over a concept, she ultimately has to do her homework problems on her own.

Example 2:
If a kid asks “What does <X> mean?” we answer "It’s another word for ‘dictionary’ "

Projects are the kids responsibility. If they need help figuring out how to do something, I’ll take the same approach as homework - create a new ‘mini-project’ to demonstrate the concept & then turn them loose. My main guideline on projects is “Don’t ask me for help the night before it’s due”. If the kid has honestly worked on the project & just needs some finishing touches or has honestly forgetten something, I’ll make an exception. But I don’t reward procrastination.

5

Mine are pretty young, but at 7 and 9 they still have a surprising amount of homework. For math, I ususally just let them work on their own, but will answer questions or offer examples. We do check over every assignment and have them redo any problems that are wrong.

My husband oversteps the line sometimes, especially in writing assignments. He will pretty much dictate them to the kids, so I try to have them at least make a start on getting things in their own words before he takes over. In general, I think it’s good to have both of us involved and I think he will back off a bit as they get older.

6

Most of the “help” is motivational help – as in, “Did you do your homework yet?” And usually when the kids say they don’t understand something, or don’t know what to write, it just means they need a push: “Well, what do you think it means?” Occasionally, when they genuinely don’t understand something, I’ll explain how to do it, which in effect means giving them the answer.

But overall the kids are pretty good about their homework, and I don’t have to nag them or help them too much. Knock on wood!

7

I used to, pretty much.

I’ve posted on here before about my struggles with my son’s homework issues. (That is, he just wouldn’t do it.) It got to the point where, in sixth grade and under his teacher’s advice, I was literally sitting next to him at the dining room table with his papers and books and pointing to each problem in turn for him to solve. Every paper was initialed by me, every homework assignment in his assignment book signed by the teacher, and I would sign the book as having witnessed the assignment done. Then I watched him with my own eyes put his paper into his binder and the binder back into his bag. (This didn’t help much, as he started simply not turning in the work I had seen him do with my own eyes.) While I didn’t actually provide the answers, I did everything but - asking very leading questions and breaking everything down into Captain Dummy Speak. For. Every. Single. Question. Didn’t matter if we were on number 1 or number 10 of identical problems, each time I had to walk him through it. The worse he got, the more “involved” I became. I hated it. He hated it. We started to sorta hate each other.

Then I read *Parenting With Love and Logic *and attended the Landmark Forum in the same week. Wow, was that a one-two punch! I realized that I had been making his academic progress my problem instead of his, and making his impending failure and retention mean that I was a bad parent who couldn’t solve his problems for him because I wasn’t doing enough. I further realized that if it was so hard for him to do this on his own, perhaps he really wasn’t ready for seventh grade, and it would be a *benefit *to repeat sixth. And better to repeat sixth than seventh or eighth, socially.

I told him his homework was henceforth his concern. I am available upon request for coaching and explanation, but I am not a taskmaster. If he didn’t do his homework, or didn’t turn in his homework, it’s likely he’d fail, and that it was OK with me, and I’d love him anyway.

Within two weeks, his four failing grades were up to A’s and B’s. And his grades have stayed there, pretty much, for the last two years. When one starts slipping, I just ask him, “Are you cool with this D in English on your interim report?” And he says, “No, not really.”
“Well, what are you going to do about it?”
“I have some missing assignments to get in, and Mrs. Jones said she’ll give me some extra credit if I read to the kindergarteners on Book Swap Day.”
“Great! Sounds like a good plan. Let me know if you need any help with that.”

I won’t claim it will work with every kid, and it has to be done with love and support, not frustrated “giving up”, but it worked for us like a miracle.

8

I have never been smart enough to help my son with his homework.

Seriously, when he was younger, we’d do his homework together - I’d help him if he had trouble with a concept - and we always did spelling words together. My parents approached my homework the same way.

9

Sometimes the effort of getting things on paper will defeat my kids. This reminds me of a form of help I occasionally provide, which is to transcribe what the kids dictate to me. This at least gets them thinking and producing, and pushes them past the barrier imposed by the slowness of their handwriting. Whatever I transcribe they can then recopy.

10

My kids are little, so this has not come up.

But I will tell you that a frequent occurrence at the libraries I’ve worked at is parents or grandparents coming in to do their child’s research–often during school hours. I’ve met tiny little Russian grannies who barely speak English, who were trying to find the books for their grandson’s project. And the number of parents who come in with their kid and then do all the talking, even when I address the kid directly–well, I get a lot of those.

11

As far as I’m concerned, that’s downright fucking cheating. It’s one thing to let your kid run wild with your Lexis code or give him/her access to university libraries or labs because you teach/work there…it’s quite another to actually DO the work for them. My high school had a strict honors code and that’s definitely the type of stuff that would have resulted in a failing grade or suspension.

I guess I view it as cultural capital-I’ve noticed professional parents tend to be able to smooth the way for their children into certain professions/careers, and help them get good grades along the way and I don’t view that as unfair. They also give them more access to things that make projects/papers easier to research or more spectacular (for instance, most of the kids in my high school had parents who taught at Brandeis/MIT/Harvard and the other local colleges…they always had better science projects than anyone else). A solid number of my classmates in law school were the children of lawyers and they ALWAYS did better than the average student. They came there knowing more about the whole process, always had connections to firms and judges blahblahblah. But it’s quite one thing to take advantage of your parents’ cultural capital and quite another to have them do the work for you and the second really really chaps my hide. Plus, if you’re doing the work for them each and every time, they’re just going to fail the tests so it’s counter-productive anyway.

12

I do this with writing assignments too. Those are the kind of assignments that always came easily to me, so I can immediately see how it should go, and think of a cool way to word it, so although I try not to come right out and say what should be written, I’ll take a kid’s perfectly good assignment and harass them in an effort to “lead” them to do it my way. I’m trying to quit.

My fourth-grade son and I do his math together every night. I don’t give the answers, but I teach the technique (when I can, sometimes I need to look in the book or ask someone else for help). :o Most of his problems are just carelessness or messiness, so I watch for that.

13

Oh, god. All the freaking time! I promise you what, if I ever have kids there’s no way in hell I’d ever go to the microfilm and do their work for them! Microfilm!

14

No big deal, and slightly off topic, but it seems like a lot of parents do this, and I’m curious as to why. I mean, is looking the word up in a dictionary (or more likely in the present time, on www.m-w.com) really so much extra work than asking mom or dad that it’s going to teach anything about initiative or effort or self-reliance?

When I was a kid, I really loved reading, and I loved reading books that were a bit - sometimes a significant bit - above my level. Those books contained an enormous number of words that I didn’t know. If I had to drop the book and thumb through the dictionary every time an unfamiliar word appeared, I never would have been able to keep my head in the story. Reading would have become a task. If I asked my dad what a word meant, and he knew, he’d just tell me, and I could go on with my reading with only ten seconds or so of lost time.

I dunno… this one has just always genuinely puzzled me, because it seems to me like promoting busywork for busywork’s sake. Thoughts?

15

The only time my parents ever did that was when I was required to take sewing in 7th grade. My mom did most of the embroidering on the pillow I had to make. My grandpa used his sewing machine to sew it together. I think I did most of the attaching various pieces of felt, and sewed on the buttons and what-not. We all thought it was ridiculous that every kid was required to take sewing. I mean, mending is one thing, but embroidery? Oh <i>hell</i> no.

(Of course, I have a hand-embroidered, did-it-myself altar cloth now. . .no thanks to that class, though. . and don’t tell anyone).

Anything else, I was on my own. My dad would sometimes help me with math, but not really so much with concepts as with “how to write your work so you and the teachers can understand it.” My mom would drill me on spelling and tell me how to remember the words.

Oh–and once, in (I think) 6th grade, my mom typed a chapter outline for me. I think I whined a lot about how it was stupid that we had to outline stuff that was already in the book, and I’d already done two chapters. I feel bad about it now. . .but it was really mindless work.

16

I refuse to flat-out give answers unless absolutely necessary, which means my son’s taken three or four tries at it and still can’t get the result. I always strive for explainations and alternate examples first so he can learn how to work it out for himself, which seems to be working so far.

He’s only had one “project” in his academic life so far, and the only assistance I gave for that was to (a) reiterate the instructions and (b) set up a schedule to get things done, since seven-year-olds IME aren’t good at time management yet.

17

It depends on why the kid is asking for a spelling. If they’re asking it so they don’t have to do their vocabulary/spelling homework, no way should they get help. If they’re trying to look something up or for some other reasons, no biggie.

18

I’m perfectly willing to tell my kid what words mean; I agree that it’s a pain to have to stop in the middle of a good story and look up a word. Besides, quite often we can have some fun when I can connect the word to other words she already knows. She’s pretty much my clone anyway (it’s kind of scary, really), so I know that she will spend hours with her head in the dictionary if I don’t force it on her.

I did have one friend who was quite vocal about the fact that she and her husband had done some of her child’s homework. Apparently the girl (elementary age) had spent the year so overloaded with homework that it wasn’t possible for her to finish it all, though she was a perfectly bright kid who wanted to do well. The parents thought that she was getting way too much, and a lot of it was pointless anyway, so they “helped” her with some of it. I could see their point, but at the same time I thought it might be better to talk to the teacher and then simply refuse to do more than a reasonable amount if the teacher kept piling it on. However, they might well have talked with the teacher and I just don’t know about it, and I can quite see why they might not want to sacrifice their daughter’s grades–but I figure grade school wouldn’t matter.

19

My younger brother has dysgraphia, which means he can barely write. My parents take dictation from him a lot, but he supplies all the content.

20

I had a friend in elementary school whose parents would “check” her homework every night. As in, go over everything she did and have her fix all of her wrong answers. I think that was cheating, and I wouldn’t do it for my own kids, unless I saw that the kid had completely misunderstood the concept or didn’t get anything right at all. Then I’d step in and do some tutoring until the kid could do it right on his or her own.

We were graded mainly on our homework scores back then, so getting a perfect 100% on every homework assignment made you a straight-A student almost by default. No fair! I had to learn to live with my careless mistakes and take Bs and Cs, or do my own homework more carefully if I wanted the A.