Parents and Homework: How Can Parents Best Support their Children?

Paul S. Oberman, PhD

Most parents can picture this scene: It’s 9:00 p.m. and your 3rd grade child is in tears at the kitchen table. His bedtime is usually 8:30, but he hasn’t finished his math homework that is due tomorrow. You look and see that he has missed most of the problems that he has done, and he still has a few more to do. You know his teacher collects and grades his homework, and he is already struggling in the class. How can you best support your child?

Some possible solutions for helping your child include:

• Call it a night, telling him to go to sleep. Continuing to work and produce incorrect answers isn’t helping anyone.
• Save him by doing the homework for him. That way at least he will turn in homework that is correct and “earn” a better homework grade.
• Assist by circling the wrong answers and ask him to correct those answers. Perhaps that will be enough to guide him.
• Create a similar problem or problems and walk him through the process. Then he should be able to do the other problems.
• Create a similar problem and let him walk you through his process, trying to note where he makes his error(s)
• Ask him to explain what he is working on and walk you through one of his homework problems. Try to note where he makes his error(s).

Among these options, there are clearly assumptions being made about you, the parent, and the student. One of the major assumptions is that you yourself know how to solve the problems he is working on. There is also an assumption that your child draws your attention to his lack of success; certainly, he could just pack up the homework he has done and go to sleep, or he could tell you that there was no homework at all that evening. There is a further assumption that your full attention is available for your son and is not divided among your other children, your job, your hobbies, or your desire to go to sleep yourself.

The question “How can you best help your child” may have different answers depending on the time frame. The most critical question is “How can you best help your child in the long term?” Of course, under situational stress, you are almost certainly focused on the short term. So, do the short-term and long-term ways to best help your child align? Often, they will not, in which case it is critical to focus on the long-term, as difficult as that may seem.

Academic Help-Seeking

There is a great deal of research on academic help-seeking behaviors (including the dissertation of this author). The primary distinction in the literature is between instrumental help-seeking and executive help-seeking (Nelson-Le Gall, Sharon, 1981, Help-seeking: An understudied problem-solving skill in children). Instrumental help-seeking features a student seeking just enough help that she can complete the work herself. Executive help-seeking, on the other hand, involves the student simply seeking the answer.

All would agree that instrumental help-seeking is adaptive and executive help-seeking is maladaptive. With the goal of pushing our children toward adaptive help-seeking, here is a list of questions a parent could ask their child as they help with homework, classified by whether they are appropriate to lead our children toward the answer without giving them the answer outright:

• Have you checked your answers? (Instrumental)
• Can you find your mistake? (Instrumental)
• This one’s wrong. It should be 7. (Executive)
• Let’s look at your notes to see whether you did some sample problems in class. (Instrumental)
• Here is a similar problem. How would you solve it? (Instrumental)
• Is there a friend you can call for help? (Depends on whether the friend leads your child to figure out themselves or simply gives them the answer.)
• Can you explain to me what the problem is all about? (Instrumental)

Notably, the instrumental ways of helping are often questions rather than statements, as you put the onus back on your child.

Considerations for Parents

I used to run an exercise with high school parents in which they stood on one side of the room if they completely agreed with a statement and on the other side of the room if they completely disagreed. They could also find a place anywhere between these two extremes, depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed. My first statement was “I put a lot of pressure on my child to succeed academically.” After parents found their spot on the continuum and explained why they were in that location, I shared the next statement which was “My child puts a lot of pressure on themselves to succeed academically.” What was especially notable was the frequency with which parents moved to the opposite side of the room in response to the second statement. In other words, if parents put pressure on their children to succeed, the children often put very little pressure on themselves. If the parents did not put pressure on their children, the children tended to put pressure on themselves. This suggests that, at least at the high school level, the more your child can own their work, the better, as you will be able to step back and not pressure your child about homework, which can only help your relationship.

Another consideration is your child’s self-efficacy beliefs; in other words, does your child believe that he can do the math work? While there has been a great deal of focus on self-esteem, self-efficacy is the better predictor of long-term success in a subject area. An important question in the homework-helping decision, then, is what effect your help will have on your child’s self-efficacy beliefs in the subject area that help is being sought. Will your child feel better or worse about their ability to be successful after your homework assistance? Certainly, if you do the homework for them, they will not believe that they can be successful alone, so this is a losing proposition on the self-efficacy front.

One timely comparison is to consider how you would feel if your child were asking for artificial intelligence help from a source such as ChatGPT rather than asking for your help. How would you want ChatGPT to help? Might the source of the help change the value you perceive in the help given? How would you feel if the AI source gave your child the answers?

Another important consideration is that we are raising our children to leave us. At what age do you bow out of the homework, whether developmentally or because you are not capable of giving help (or it starts too many arguments)? Of course, we cannot accompany them to college. So, it is important to gradually wean them from our help. For neurotypical children, parents should certainly expect to help only minimally once they start high school. Often organization and tracking of homework is still challenging, particularly for boys, but that is different than helping with homework itself.

In The Blessing of a Skinned Knee by Wendy Mogel, she encourages us to let our children fail while they are still in the relatively safe environs of our homes. If the first time our child faces a major setback is in college, they are unlikely to be as resilient or have as large a tool kit of ways to respond to the failure. Therefore, it’s better that they fail and learn how to respond earlier in life.

What do Teachers Want?

What would teachers like you to do in terms of helping your child? One thing is certain across all schools everywhere: your school and teacher do not want you to do your child’s homework. The purpose of homework is (or should be) reinforcing and perhaps deepening the skills your child has learned. Sending your child to school with your work is confusing at best, and it sends a terrible message to your child about academic integrity, as they implicitly accept credit for your work. Finally, your child learns from making mistakes, and disallowing this opportunity blocks a critical part of the learning process.

It would also be a great idea to speak directly to the teacher, explaining your child’s struggles and asking how you and the teacher can partner with your child for success. As a teacher I used to set a time limit, telling students not to put in more than a certain amount of time, and when they ran out of time to write at that spot “ran out of time.” As a teacher, that data is important. It may tell me as a math teacher that the child struggled with the concept, and if it happens repeatedly it may tell me that this student needs additional support. The teacher may have other ideas for how you can help…or the teacher may ask you not to help your child.

What to do at 9 pm?

Circling back to the initial question, I would strongly urge you not to do homework for your child. As a math teacher, it was hard not helping my own children with their math homework, because I had difficulty letting them leave an incorrect answer on the page. I finally solved this dilemma by only working with them on problems similar to the homework rather than the homework problems themselves. I would suggest this as a wise policy choice so that you do not inadvertently end up doing and/or correcting much of their homework. Some of us may have an easier answer helping our children with an assignment that has no right/wrong answers, such as an essay. The solution seems more clear-cut here, as we can certainly suggest ideas just as surely as we cannot write the essay ourselves. Other valuable prompts might include “Would this essay persuade you,” “Have you addressed all aspects of the rubric,” or “Have you put in your best effort?” The more ownership your child can take, the better, so if they can check their work themselves that is a positive step. The pencil or pen should always remain in your child’s hands, and you should never just tell them the answer. If you can help your child by asking them questions, that is the ideal. And since in our example it was already 9:00 pm, I would strongly consider sending your child to bed, then brainstorming with the teacher the next day which of the other approaches is better for a much earlier time in the coming days and weeks.

Paul S. Oberman, Ph.D., is the founder of Oberman Tutoring and Oberman Educational Consulting. He has been involved in education since 1989 and loves considering education at all ages. He enjoys speaking to schools and parents, including on the topic of homework. He can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected]

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