My daughter is in fourth grade, so she has homework now. I help her with her arithmetic homework, which mostly consists of just checking it when she’s finished. Sometimes she doesn’t understand how to do a problem, so then I show her.
Her mother helps her with her Chinese and other homework. Same thing, mostly just checking.
When I grew up, I mostly didn’t do my homework and my parents weren’t involved in my school life.
My father would help me build projects for school - he made a lovely pyramid with perfectly mitered corners, which I then decorated by trying to glue sand on the plywood base (that didn’t work very well) and sticking palm trees and camels around. I would’ve been in elementary school at the time. As far as academics, if I needed help, they would’ve been glad to give it, but I never really did. My mother was a teacher.
StG
My parents didn’t really help me with homework past the very very basics of reading and writing; I mean, I’m sure if I’d asked questions, they’d have tried to answer, but they definitely held the view that that was what school was for, and they’d already finished with school thankyouverymuch, hence they had no need to do more school work.
I’m currently a mature student- one of my classmates, older than me, kept getting her teenage kids to help every time she needed to use a computer for anything, mostly straight up doing it for her. This largely wasn’t marked work, it was formative stuff. Seemed a bit pointless; do it or don’t, you’re paying for the classes either way, but why pretend you’re doing it while learning nothing?
My mom never helped me with homework. However, I also didn’t have such a heavy homework load in elementary as my kids did/do. My son when he was in elementary had a minimum of about 40-45 minutes of homework a night starting in kindergarten. Most kindergartners have trouble sitting in a chair that long. I remember the teachers chirping, “Oh, it’s only a few minutes!” but yeah - homework turned into a couple of hours really easily if there was no parental help. Since we both work, we had the choice of help our kid and have dinner at a normal time and a healthy bedtime with playtime to run off some energy or force an exhausted burntout kid to do everything on his own, only to go to bed late every night but Fridays to make darn sure he really hates learning.
Once my daughter got into elementary, homework had dwindled down to about 10 minutes/night, and she is simply a faster learner than my son. Sometimes I wonder if his slowness is related to being forced to do so much damn homework so early. Who thought that was a good idea?
Anyway, they both do all their homework on their own now unless they’re really stuck and need a pointer or two.
My parents didn’t help with my homework, but I never asked them to. I helped my kids with theirs when they asked, and certainly that sometimes meant giving me a few minutes to go over the lesson and figure out what it was talking about. I’m no math whiz, but sometimes that helped.
My wife used to teach math, and often my son preferred to ask me. Because I would try to answer his question. My wife tended to answer the question he should have asked. Sometimes it helps to ask someone a little less clueless than someone a lot less clueless.
My son never asked me when he was doing statistics and calculus in college, and he aced both courses. And now he is going back for his master’s in engineering (an Asian engineer - what are the odds) and I don’t expect he will ask me this time either.
Regards,
Shodan
I was born in 1989 and my parents did not help me really with my homework. We were latchkey kids and were expected to have worked on our homework before our mother got home. We weren’t expected to have it done and had more time to work on it after dinner.I have distinct memories of my parents helping my older sister but not me. I never really needed it though. I don’t really remember having a large volume of homework until I got to high school.
My daughter will be starting kindergarten in the fall so I’m gearing up for what that will look like. So far, no homework has come home from preschool.
My kids’ primary school had a “no homework before Grade 5” policy (apart from readers). One of the great things about this is that it stops you from falling into the pattern of parents helping with homework as a matter of course. Much easier to say to a ten-year-old ‘eh, your homework mate, up to you to get it done’ than to a five year old. About once a year someone might have a big project on that we would help with materials or planning, and we give ‘what does the teacher mean when she asks XYZ’ type of help fairly regularly. And have been known to do maths at the dinner table, but only because it’s fun.
Weren’t tempted to roll the second map up tight and instruct the teacher on orifices in which it might be shoved? That sounds like pretty egregiously shitty teaching, and makes me mad for you just hearing the story.
My wife and I believed that the only true discipline is self-discipline and we virtually never had anything to do with their homework. The result: they all finished first (2 of them) or second (the other one) in their HS class.
The only time we interfered were a couple of occasions where the elementary teacher didn’t understand the math (the kids did) and we protested a bad mark and one instance where my son was having trouble with an assignment involving matrices and emailed me asking for help. I solved it and he credited me with helping him (Princeton had an honor code). And that’s it. I don’t understand this business of parents “helping” with homework. This was in the 70s and 80s by the way.
My parents helped with my homework when it was a case of me not understanding the question or math problem. They helped if I asked for help. They helped by walking me through it, making me do each step, asking me questions that would help me understand it on my own, etc. This is exactly the same way I helped my son with is homework.
Some kids need help. Others don’t.
My favorite elementary teacher didn’t really think her homework assignments through. Some were of the type “find three words ending in -gry”. I remember groups of parents brainstorming and not being able to find suitable answers.
As a retired teacher, I was happy if the parents were interested in their kid’s education.
As for homework, I strongly preferred that they just explained the concepts and didn’t write the whole thing…
I always enjoyed helping with homework, but sometimes got in trouble for it. In grade school, my daughter was trying to do a problem that looked like algebra, but they hadn’t really learned algebra yet. I explained to her about using “x” to represent an unknown . . . etc. She picked up the concept pretty quickly.
The next day the teacher asked for the answer and my daughter raised her hand. Her answer was correct. Then, the teacher asked how she got the answer. The teacher expected her to say that she randomly tried numbers, going up or down as needed, until she hit the correct answer. I guess then she’d introduce a better way to solve problems. Instead, my daughter began, " I let x equal . . ."
The teacher was unhappy and let me know it.
Earlier that year my daughter told me they were learning about how drugs were bad. I explained to her that while some drugs were very bad, there were also drugs that were very good when used appropriately. We talked about insulin, antibiotics, and chemo drugs. We talked about licit and illicit use. I had to meet with the teacher over that as well.
I don’t recall my parents helping me much if at all–dad is a PhD in physics, mom MA in chemistry and later computer science as well.
I do help my daughter and I’m puzzled by people who seem to assume that helping=doing the work for a child. When she’s stuck we discuss concepts, like general principles of her math problems, or how to approach/structure an essay. I’ll also help her walk through math problems (without giving answers) although she has progressed very rapidly this year so that doesn’t happen any more. Grammar is a difficult one because even though I’m often paid to write I kind of picked up the rules instinctually and don’t know them off the top. We wind up learning those together. And my wife or I will drill her on practice test questions for whatever subject.
I think the most common exchange would be, “Dad (or mom), is this right/how do I/what is…?” followed by the responses “What do you think? Why?”
That probably makes it sound like we spend a lot of time helping with homework, but we really don’t–it’s no more than one or two hours total per week from both of us, sometimes none.
I’m looking forward to help with my daughter’s homework. Mainly just to fuck with the teachers though.
My mom never did any work for me, but she helped me out in many ways. And if there was something I was learning and needed help with that she didn’t know, then she’d learn it herself.
My sister, meanwhile, would every day when she got home teach me everything she’d learned in math class that day, giving me a three-year head start on most of it.
I didn’t get help from my parents. They were very hands-off. House clean, food on the table, decent clothes, money in the bank? We’re good. My wife and I helped our kids more than we probably should have, but it’s harder to not help than I would have guessed. (One is now a college graduate and the other is in college.) Also they had some teachers that weren’t very good at explaining stuff to kids (wait–what? Teachers who can’t explain stuff?), or didn’t have time to address individual students’ needs. I was always walking the line between trying to teach my kids to be independent vs. keeping them from floundering. My daughter said many times, “I wish my teacher could explain stuff like you.”
As far as expectations, I don’t think parents are ***expected ***to help. But parents are much more solicitous than a generation ago.
My mom helped me with my homework. Mostly, she was someone to bounce stuff off of when I was trying to write a paper – something I found very hard to do.
I helped my kids, too. Mostly, I helped them learn to write. (“Rather than starting by writing it down, why don’t you start by just telling me… then we can write what you said.” (And “we” mean “I prompt you to write what you just said to me.”
But I also helped with math. “Well, you could draw a picture to explain why you know that 2x3 is 6, but if you want to just tell your teacher than you have memorized your times tables, I will support you”.
My kids pretty much stopped asking for help by the time they were ten. And I would have been delighted if my kids had a “no homework” policy when they were young. They found the homework very stressful.
We often talked math, current events, ad science at the dinner table, because, well, it’s interesting. We taught the kids a lot of math – not because it was their homework, but because we were waiting for our pizza to come, and the tables had a nice grid of tiles, and talking about multiplication and using the tiles to illustrate was a pleasant way to pass the time.
I rarely asked my parents for help, but I do remember struggling with math problems in the sixth grade and asking my father if he could help me. He tried, but he couldn’t figure it out and got really frustrated.
I also remember needing help with something in third grade and crying because my mother had to go to a meeting.
Helping with homework is simple. If the kids gets stuck on a concept or a procedure you help them learn it. The purpose of homework shouldn’t be to subject children to unnecessary stress. It’s to provide practice and reinforcement.