Last week, I shared some unpopular opinions about homework. Mostly, here and on Facebook, people disagreed with me that three hours of meaningful homework was not too much. And looking back at that statement — which wasn’t exactly what I said — I see their point. Do I want my kid to be focused on academics for a full 10 hours a day? (Assuming that for those seven hours of school, she’s being taught.) When it’s put in those black-and-white terms, no, I don’t think that’s reasonable. Nor do I think the debate is all that black and white.

Regardless, parents all over the interwebs are pissed off about the amount of homework our kids are assigned. Their complaints range from the truly anguished (“I tried for two hours to help my son with his math homework, but with his learning differences, I just can’t get him to understand!”) to the kind of petty (“Having to sign a reading log is busy work — for me!”). It got me wondering, what do we do to lower this stress, for parents and students?

So I came up with some ideas. Try them out at home, and let me know how it works for you. And if you have your own ideas, please share them!

1. Reset the Priorities

What is the point of homework? Is it meant to help kids practice what they’ve learned? Extend lessons from class? Finish up something that didn’t get done in school? Complete a long-term project from start to finish? Torture you and your kid?

If you know what you want your kid to get out of homework, you can better set the parameters. See, this is your kid, not the school’s. What you want your kid to get out of his or her education matters. A lot. Once you know your homework philosophy, find out what the school and teachers think. (They might feel differently from one another.)

Then you’ve got to decide what hill to die on. If getting the right answer is a big deal for your kid’s math teacher but a conceptual understanding is what you value, someone’s going to have to compromise. For example, I’ve told my kid that I don’t believe timed math drills are useful tools. (And that’s backed up by research, y’all.) We agreed that if her grade was negatively affected by them, I would go in and talk to the teacher. Stress was instantly lowered. If signing a reading log is arduous for you, give your child that responsibility. Or decide that you’re not going to figure everything down to the minute and shoot for an estimate instead.

When the stress gets high, go back to those priorities. Talk to teachers about assignments that don’t meet your homework priorities. And if necessary, allow your kid to blow off things that are not meaningful. (Yes, I just said that.)

2. Set a Flexible Homework Routine

Whatever this schedule is, it needs to work with your family. Kids who go to aftercare may finish up their assignments before they get home. (At my daughter’s school, that’s a requirement for most assignments and students.) Other kids may come straight home, have a snack and shoot some hoops before hitting the books. Still others may not start homework until after dinner or even get up super early in the morning to finish an assignment.

Most kids really do count on structure, and it’s important that they know what to expect. At the same time, the schedule should be flexible enough to make room for everyday life — like a good cry after a fight with a friend or a quick trip to the ice cream shop for an after-school treat. When they know they can “break the rules” from time to time, they’re less likely to test their parents all of the time.

It’s also important to pay attention to how the schedule is working out — especially from year to year. My daughter used start her homework as soon as she walked in the door. But when she got a little older, it was apparent that she needed 30 minutes or so to unwind, to do something that had nothing to do with school. Of course, as kids enter middle and high school, this schedule should be their own.

3. STOP Reteaching

I can’t emphasize this enough. Stop it. Right. Now.

You are not the teacher. When you reteach, not only do you risk making your kid furious and even more frustrated with the work, you risk confusing your kid. Big time.

There is a reason that long division is going the way of the dodo bird. There is a reason that teachers introduce algebra in earlier grades. There is a reason that kids learn how to find the least common multiple before they learn to add fractions. And you might not know what those reasons are.

I would never attempt to perform brain surgery on my kid. I wouldn’t try to fix the hybrid system on my car. That’s because I’m not trained to do these things. And while many parents do an amazing job homeschooling their kids, mostly, they’re achieving this with the whole picture — and a lot of professionally developed resources.

This is probably the hardest step. It also holds the most promise for lowering stress. I promise.

4. Ask Questions, Don’t Give Answers

Want to know how to accomplish the last step? It’s pretty simple, actually. When your kid says, “I don’t know how to do this!” respond with a question.

“What does the assignment say?”
“Can you explain to me what the teacher asked for?”
“What is confusing you?”
“How can I help you figure it out?”

This puts the responsibility back onto your kid — where it belongs — without taking on any of her stress. Keep asking questions, even if she can’t answer them. Don’t solve the problems for her, but look for her to find her own solutions.

5. Let Your Kid Fail

Kids learn from making mistakes. We don’t do them any favors by preventing them from failure.

I’d rather my kid fail a homework assignment than a test and a test than a grade. And I’d rather my kid fail at something when she’s 10 years old than when she’s 40 years old. Failure at a young age won’t keep her from experiencing later failures. But she will learn from those little failures.

For that reason, you should quit checking your kids’ homework for accuracy. Heck, when they get to be in middle school, you should probably stop checking to see if their homework is done. Give them the right structure for success — space and time to complete homework assignments, little reminders, etc. — but let them chart their own way. (My friend and colleague, Denise Schipani calls this African-Violet Parenting. I call it parenting by benign neglect.)

So there you have it, five steps for lowering the homework stress in your house. I can’t promise that you’ll never have another fight with your kid, but I can say that following these steps will help you keep your cool.

Do you have other suggestions? Share them in the comments section. 

Last week, I heard from many friends and colleagues about Karl Taro Greenwood’s Atlantic.com piece, “My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me.”

“Amen!”

“I could have written this!”

“When are teachers going to learn that they’re piling on way too much???”

It was clear to me that the emotion of this piece resonated. But really what I think is this: Mr. Greenwood is probably a very nice man, but he comes off like a whiney, know-it-all parent. And he’s worried about the wrong damned things.

If you read Greenwood’s story, you know he’s worried that his daughter is getting too much homework. At the tender age of 13 years, she wasn’t able to fall asleep until after midnight, because of her homework load. He admitted that bias up front, and decided to see for himself. He took on his daughter’s assignments for a full week.

But really, what he should be paying attention to is the kind of homework his kids are doing.

At the same time, I can compeltely identify with his frustration about his kid’s bedtime. My kid often goes to sleep after midnight. She spends way too much time on homework, but I can say without hesitation that the fault lies with her, because her routine looks something like this: text friends, try to find her worksheet, text, check out when the new episodes of New Girl are coming on Netflix, text, do three math problems, text, find a new Pandora station on her phone, read her library book, finish her math, start science… well, you get the picture. By 10:00 p.m., she’s an anxious mess sometimes.

Her homework load is not too much. It’s generally between one and three hours each night, depending on how much she’s procrastinated on her weekly projects/assignments. (That is, if she actually gets to work, instead of goofing off.)

Greenwood’s daughter averages about three hours. Yes, that’s a lot. But if she’s staying up so late, it’s because she’s not getting started until 8:00 p.m.. (He never says why.) That’s a full five hours after my kid gets out of school, and even with her three-times-a-week soccer practice, it’s way, way later than she usually gets started.

But the thing that bothers me the most is what Greenwood writes here:

The Spanish, however, presents a completely different challenge. Here, Esmee shows me that we have to memorize the conjugations of the future tense of regular and irregular verbs, and she slides me a sheet with tener, tendré,tendrás, tendrá, tendremos, etc., multiplied by dozens of verbs. My daughter has done a commendable job memorizing the conjugations. But when I ask her what the verb tener means (“to have,” if I recall), she repeats, “Memorization, not rationalization.”

She doesn’t know what the words mean.

Shocking. Certainly, each subject requires a little bit of “fake it ’til you make it,” but not to know what the verb means is pretty amazing. And the fact that his daughter has so completely internalized the message “memorization, not rationalization” is truly tragic. That message goes against any educational philosophy I was taught at university.

At the same time, the author is incredibly proud of his (and his daughter’s) ability to pick up on the patterns presented by combining like terms in algebraic expressions. He whizzes right through those problems (none of the math homework is excessive, in my opinion), but has he merely memorized or is he really understanding what the process means? I could be wrong, but my guess is that he might have trouble explaining why the process works.

In other words, critical thinking is important in Spanish, science and literature, but really thinking through the whys of math? Nah, it’s way better to finish those problems as quickly as possible.

Easy homework = good homework?

The homework wars will never end. And that’s because when we all get home from work and school, no one wants the fight that ensues. We want to play board games or curl up on the couch and watch stupid television or read books that weren’t assigned to us.

But if teachers assigned homework that really mattered, would parents still be upset? If teachers asked kids to answer the hard questions, like “How did you get your answer?” or “Ask a family relative about his or her experience with immigration,” would we revolt, because that’s hard too? When schools are serious about rigor, do parents retaliate?

Homework shouldn’t be busy work. But I still believe that there’s real value to asking students to practice what they’ve learned or make some connections on their own. When we parents approach this in a positive way, we have an opportunity to teach our children than learning doesn’t stop at 2:50 p.m. or when we graduate from college.

What would happen if we sent our kids a positive message about their homework? (While working against excessive or stupid assignments, of course.)

This afternoon, my kid walked home from soccer practice, grabbed a snack and ran up to her room shouting, “I’m going to work on my science essay!” I don’t think this thing is due  until the beginning of next month. I didn’t have anything to do with her being excited to get to work. I also didn’t get in her way. She likes this assignment — probably because it’s challenging — and she’s happy to do it.

I’d say that one step in that direction is a little less whining, and a little more listening to kids and teachers.

P.S. Greenwood had lots of reasons to be ticked off about his kid’s school, starting with the lousy parent-teacher conferences. I don’t mean to suggest that he was off-base with everything.

P.P.S. Atlantic also had a great piece from a teacher, who is reassessing her practice of giving homework. I thought her reasons and concerns were compelling. Parents should read that piece as well: Should I Stop Assigning Homework? by Jessica Lahey.

What do you think about the homework your kid is getting? Homeschooling parents, what’s your take on the homework wars?