I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal about school children in the United States having too much homework. The article asserted that schools were assigning time-consuming homework to the detriment of other activities, including precious family time. Shortly thereafter I read another newspaper article regarding people’s regrets. Parents regretted not spending enough time with their children. The article suggested that parents come home from work in time to tuck their kids into bed.
There have been more than a few nights that all of us–my wife, our son, and I–have grumbled about the amount of homework he must do. It is not uncommon for him to work until ten o’clock at night on homework and to rise early the next morning to work for another hour before leaving for school. As his parents, we assist by helping him organize his tasks, by reviewing his work, and by helping him with corrections. After working all day and taking care of other responsibilities, it can be aggravating to spend the evening going through the sixth grade, again.
However, while we might gripe about homework sometimes, we recognize that like exercise, it may not always be enjoyable, but it is necessary for improvement. Ultimately, we are thankful for the homework our son’s teachers assign him. They are doing it to help him. Regarding the notion that homework takes away family time, in fact, the opposite is true. We spend A LOT of time together doing homework. As I reflect on that time spent together, I find it to be quality time. How wonderful to be able to help a child learn new concepts, uncover history, and explore the world! Isn’t spending time with our children to help them grow something we wanted when we created or adopted them?
Let’s be honest. Without homework, many parents and their children probably would spend less time together. What would have been time bonding over homework would instead become a child playing a video game and parents anesthetizing themselves with facebook, the television or maybe more work. My God, a newspaper article wants to set the standard for parent-child bonding at the level of trying to get home from work to tuck our kids into bed! How sad that spending a few minutes with our kids before bed would be an acceptable goal. However, such a low standard does comport with parental complaints about too much homework. Parents who barely are willing to make time to tuck-in their kids certainly wouldn’t want to spend time with them doing homework.
Of course, there are parents whose dire financial circumstances truly do not afford them time to do homework with their children or even to put them to bed. For
P. Gustav Mueller, author of The Present.
Referenced in this post:
Down with Homework, Say U.S. School Districts, Wall Street Journal