Help With Homework
Of the many areas that a parent sees ways to help their child out, maybe the hardest one to get right is learning to help them get their homework done. More than one parent has become so frustrated trying to get a child to do his or her homework that they resorted to doing it for them. Obviously this defeats the entire purpose that homework was sent with the child in the first place. This wastes your time and it is cheating. It sends many bad messages to your child. It is better to let them fail and learn the consequences of failure than to coddle a child like that.
But there are ways for you as a parent to provide the structure, the setting and the organization system for your child which will model for them how to take on a big project such as a back pack full of homework. The first goal has to be to learn to work WITH your kiddo rather than for you and he or she to be at odds with each other about this area of their academic success. The well known battle over learning how much homework a child has and then constantly having to use "did you get your homework done?" as your greeting for your offspring gets old pretty fast.
A better approach is to take advantage of modern technology like email and wiki pages and build a relationship with the school and the teacher so you can be informed on a daily basis what your child's homework is each day. In this way, you can develop a daily work schedule that your son or daughter can sign onto. This does take some of the work of keeping track of homework away from the child but it is a good short term accommodation. Eventually when the student realizes he cannot "hide" his homework assignments, it will become a habit to take responsibility for the work and the parents can ease out of this role.
Another compromise that is not as extreme as doing homework for your child is to do it with him. By sitting down at the kitchen table and laying out the homework, you can look at what faces the youngster and guide the completion process. Difficult assignments can be discussed and you can give your child guidance on how to complete the easy work first and then how to tackle the challenging work with the satisfaction that much of the bulk of the work has been done.
Along with the encouragement and organization you can teach your child, he or she will value your company. Doing homework for several hours can be a lonely task. If you sit at the table with your son or daughter, you can be there to make homework a social event. Once the student gets into doing his or her homework without a lot of help, you can begin to bring paperwork of your own to the session and work on that as the child does the work of the day for school.
The outcome is you teach organization and commitment to a goal not by nagging but by example and modeling. And you use homework time to build a bond between you and your child. That bond may be the real long lasting benefit that can come from a commitment by you to be your son or daughters partner in success in getting that homework done.