Possibly one reason parents step in to help with their children’s homework is that we see our kids being overwhelmed by it. There is so much of it that it eats any and all spare time the child may have in the world.
In the “olden days,” children didn’t have extensive schedules after school. They didn’t have many extracurricular activities and usually one parent was at home when the child got home from school. They had several idle hours between the 2:30 bell and 8 or 9 p.m. bed time, so squeezing in 30 or 60 minutes for homework wasn’t that bad. It was a convenient way of stretching the school day and augmenting the classroom learning. A kid could spend a couple of hours at the park playing stickball or football games, or going fishing in nearby streams. They had time to take a short hike into the hills around their home, with time enough left over to get home before dark, do homework, eat dinner, take a bath, watch maybe one TV program, then off to bed.
But society changed, childrens’ lives changed. We can’t let our kids simply hang out at the park after school any more. There are myriad organized activities that eat after-school time and expand our children’s horizons. Instead of pick-up stickball games, kids are members of multiple organized baseball teams. They also play volleyball, basketball, tennis, soccer. They are on swim teams, Pokemon leagues, Yu Gi Oh! tournaments, chess club, speech and debate teams, math leagues, competitions, meets, scheduled practices. It is endless.
These days, the kids are likely to be picked up right after school lets out. They change in the car on the way to extracurricular activity. They eat a quick meal at the McDonald’s drive-through and then they’re off for a couple of hours of directed activities.
Parents may be juggling two or three kids’ after-school activities. They drop off one kid at soccer, then race off to the other kid’s baseball practice. Drop off and race to the dance studio for the third child’s hula lesson. Then race back to wait for the first practice to end, then back to the hula studio, then back to the baseball field. Now it’s dark. Anybody hungry? OK, we gotta get home. “Who has homework?” All three raise their hands.
There is far more kid-friendly media available these days, as well. Cartoons used to be on for 1/2 hour in the afternoon, on one channel, every day. Now there are hundreds of channels and three or four channels of children’s programming. We have the Cartoon Channel, the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel, Discovery Channel, all vying for attention. There is the Internet with its instant information delivery, there is AIM, email, Google, the Worldwide Web. These have all become part of the fabric of modern life.
Our kids are just trying to keep up with the adults, to stay abreast with what the world is doing. All this stuff is considered just a normal part of their daily lives. So many things vying for attention, but the same amount of time. “Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking, into the future…”
The teacher may think they are assigning one simple task that should only take 15 minutes to complete, but add that to the homework and projects budget assigned by all the “Specials” teachers and other teachers in a “team” environment and they all add up.
The assignment may seem innocuous when given. It may be a simple task when fresh, in a school environment, when the teacher has just gotten done explaining what is required. But add several hours and other activities between the time of assignment and the time the kid sits down to do it and much has been lost.
The teacher never sees the child sitting, late at night, past bedtime, with the parents, stressing over a homework assignment. The parents thinking “this is so simple. Why are we having a problem?” And the kid with a blown a fuse.
They just can’t do any more. They want to stop and sit quietly for a minute, to not have to think or focus on some matter of dire importance, like the “F” grade they’re likely to get for the assignment that is staring them in the face, taunting them. They’d rather do something mindless for a few minutes before they have to go to bed, to relax a bit.
But no, they procrastinated, they dragged butt on the homework assignment before this one and now it’s late. They’re tired. They’re bored. They don’t get the significance of what they are being required to do. They don’t care. They just want it to be over. They want it to go away.
Finally, exasperated, realizing that the exercise has degenerated into a lost cause, the parent steps in and directs the child through the motions of completing the final assignment. The child learns nothing but a distaste for homework.