agonyaunt | (no subject)

(no subject)

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I have four children, one toddler and three in school. My husband spent his young adulthood in therapy, healing and learning the skills he knew he’d need in parenthood to not repeat the bad patterns of his own childhood (through which he suffered abuse at the hands of his father), and he is a wonderful and engaged father. The one problem is that he refuses to be involved in homework, because of trauma from his father specifically around homework battles.

I don’t disbelieve him in the least. I believe him when he tells me that nightly homework was traumatic for him. And he does take care of our toddler and other chores while I manage homework time. The thing is, homework is beyond exhausting for me. Frankly, every night is a battle with my older children. I don’t think the amount of homework they’re assigned is unreasonable at all (our school has a policy for what and how much the teachers may assign). The kids are fully capable of completing their work in less time than they spend complaining about having to do it. And I am not doing it for them—my involvement is literally just getting them to do it. But because they fight me on it, it’s a misery, one that’s repeated every evening. It’s nice that my husband handles other things, but you know what? Sometimes I want to handle those other things and get a break from the homework war. Even just once or twice a week! But this is the one thing he straight-up refuses to do. He has worked through everything else that triggered him, but somehow this one thing eludes him. And he doesn’t want to go back to therapy just for this. I don’t want to discount his trauma, but I’m getting very frustrated by his refusal to even occasionally take this one dreaded task off my plate.

—Hamstrung Homework Helper

Dear Hamstrung,

Since the two options you’re offering me are both pretty miserable—that you continue to suffer through the nightly homework wars, which you find debilitating (and for which you are beginning to resent your husband, though you wish you didn’t, because you love him and empathize with him and he’s doing his fair share of the overall work) or that your husband participate in a triggering ritual that will be very painful for him—I think maybe we need to take a step back and look at this dilemma in a new light.

What if you stopped fighting with the kids about doing their homework? What if instead of either one of you badgering them to get it done, you stepped away from the whole shebang and told them, “If you don’t do your homework, you’ll have to live with the consequences at school”?

If the idea of this appalls you—if you’re sure none of your kids will ever do their homework again—I suggest you sit with this thought for a while: their homework is their responsibility. They will learn quickly what the consequences are of not turning it in. This is a case where “natural consequences” will go a long way toward solving an ongoing problem. (And yes, there may be some dismal grades along the way. Their grades, not yours. This will provide some useful life lessons—for both them and you.) Since they will eventually have to learn to handle work assigned to them without your involvement, you can kill two birds with one stone right now.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/11/homework-battles-kids-parents-advice-trauma.html

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More advice I can 100% get behind! I'll add that homework is of no proven value in elementary school, but no matter how many times you show people the evidence, nobody wants to believe it.

My elementary and middle school had an explicit no homework policy (okay, by middle school sometimes we did have some homework, in the sense of writing essays or other major projects we worked on over multiple weeks, but no make-work worksheets), and you would not believe how much this appalled other adults around me, who were convinced my parents were dooming me to academic inferiority for life. People are so weird about this topic.

Those comments are full of handwringing over "well, what if not doing their homework doesn't affect their grades and learning at all, then how will they learn that they have to do their homework!?"

I don't think those people are being facetious.

What if you stopped fighting with the kids about doing their homework? What if instead of either one of you badgering them to get it done, you stepped away from the whole shebang and told them, "If you don't do your homework, you'll have to live with the consequences at school"?

This was so obvious to me that I am surprised LW didn't think of that herself.

I was really struck by how obvious it was because I never would have thought of it in a million years. "School = homework" is pretty ingrained in my little head and I will have to unpack that.

I was told this repeatedly by teachers, and I generally agree with it, but the issue is sometimes if you have a depressed student or a student who simply struggles with school, the "natural consequences" here (which, again, I usually love) can have much longer and harder consequences.

My other thought would be, if the kids are simply arguing/procrastinating, maybe it's worth (if feasible) hiring a college student/older young adult to either come be a mother's assistant in the evening, or if they're really struggling, hire a tutor. (My spouse is a teacher and occasionally sidelines as tutor.) Even if the assistant and/or tutor only came a couple of days a week, it would be a relief. It might give the kids some more accountability, too, to know someone else is going to show up for them.

Agreed - I think there might be a happy medium, where LW says ‘I’m not going to fight about homework any more. I’ll remind you once at an agreed time, and I’ll be here to help if you have any questions or get stuck. But if you don’t get started when you know you should, you’ll have to explain yourself to your teachers.’

For me it would have been an inability to estimate how long the work would take, or getting distracted by more fun activities and running out of time. As an adult I got an ADHD diagnosis which explained a lot.

Ooooh, yes, that's definitely something to take into consideration too. My children dealt with ADHD and other diagnoses that affected their ability to focus/complete tasks, so yes, the hours were long and the quarrel was REAL, at points. We went through all the parenting ideas of how to offer rewards, keep charts/lists, using timers to help them figure out the length of a task, etc. as a means to try to keep motivation up and make sure things were done. But if the LW's spouse is just Not Yet Equipped to tackle that sort of thing, and LW is overwhelmed/stressed by it as well, invoking a neutral third party to help is my best bet.

I legitimately know people who went through the entire diagnostic process for no other practical purpose than to put "NO HOMEWORK" in the IEP. Sometimes they added things like "no taking away recess" and "extra time on tests", but the homework was the primary impetus for a lot of people I know.

I also know a surprising number of homeschoolers who pulled their kids out of elementary for the same reason - no homework and yes recess. (Many of them put their kids back in by high school. Homeschooling doesn't have to be all or nothing.)

Yep - there was a time I considered pulling my oldest out from public school, but as a single mom at the time, it really wasn't feasible or fair to either of us.

My other problem as a kid (well, definitely in high school aged 11-16 or 18) was that my mother wouldn’t let me fail. I quite often forgot to do things or ran out of time, but she knew that I *could* do the work, and I think she couldn’t stand to let me fail something because of time management rather than my ability in the actual subject. So there was a lot of last-minute pushing and helping and so on. Result: I never got to grips with time management AT ALL and it has been an issue my whole life. I think if she’d let me fail a bit more it would have been hard but it also might have led to some different kinds of support or intervention, or I might have learnt some coping strategies of my own.

Yeah, I have a kid with ADHD, and the brain wiring is definitely a factor in the homework (and classwork) issues.

Ultimately, the kid has to decide that they care enough about the grades to put in the work, because they're the one who has to do the work.

I'm both skeptical of the value of much of any homework at all, and skeptical that it's really so little homework that they could do it in a short time if they put their minds to it. But if the latter is actually true, it's possible they could do it better at some other time of day, or more separated from one another (three kids trying to get work done at once in the same room isn't a great situation even if they want to get it done). My youngest used to be a morning person, and could often get more done if he did homework before school. Possibly if the youngest kid who's in school did homework in the morning and went to bed a bit earlier, the older ones would be less distracted.

I also think a reality check with other parents and the teachers might be in order. If a bunch of other parents are having the same experience, then it's the homework, regardless of how sensible the school's homework policy looks on paper.

It's also possible that my ideas are just band-aid solutions, and it would be more sensible to cut the Gordian knot as suggested.

I cannot tell you how many parents in my class are really... I don't want to say upset, but ruffled by the fact I don't assign homework. I did have one parent thank me. After winter break, I'm planning to send home game ideas for parents to play to help with phonics and phonemic awareness, but it's not mandatory. After 18 years in the classroom, I haven't seen any evidence that it does anything but stress out the kids and stress out me and, quite frankly, I've got enough stress.

That being said, this is excellent advice.

It's common for a family to have one arena that's a lightning rod for all the tension. The pre-breakfast rush, bill-paying, clothes shopping ... Clearly LW's house is Tense at homework time, and a lot of other conflicts are getting acted out through homework. (You can tell that by the fact that the issue she asked about was not "What do I do about the fact that homework is a battle every single day?" but "What do I do about how my husband and I have two legitimate needs that can't both get met at the same time?")

To get at the problem she asked about, I think she should probably be looking at individual and couple therapy, just to deal with the fact that her husband's trauma is not just a part of his life but a part of hers and theirs.

To get at the practical matter of homework, I'd probably start by asking the kids what they suggested. They might come up with something creative and helpful, and even if they didn't, it would be meeting what the kidlet calls "the need to be a person."

Then I'd follow the columnist's recommendation. Possibly I'd give the teachers a heads-up and ask if we could have a meeting in six weeks or so to talk about how it was working out.

Edited (close parentheses duh) 2022-12-22 02:00 (UTC)

It's common for a family to have one arena that's a lightning rod for all the tension.

Yes. Captain Awkward calls this a "Load-Bearing Depression Repository" when it's about an individual.

Have you had your kids tested for learning disabilities?

I only ask because homework used to be agony for me as a kid and I'm an adult with ADHD and dyscalculia. One of my cousins wasn't diagnosed as severely dyslexic until his senior year of high school (also ADHD).

If your kids have used all their ability to sit still while at school, maybe sitting down for homework really is that hard.

I don't think my parents ever even asked if I had homework, or whether I had done it, or anything, let alone sitting with me to make sure I did it. Special projects? Pffft. School was my thing to sort out on my own. Or not.

So in the LW's case, stepping back, stopping hovering, and telling the kids to manage when and whether each of them does their own work and that they will be responsible for the consequences of their own decisions, is something that seems reasonable.

I've got homework trauma due to ADHD that wasn't diagnosed until I was 35. Mine doesn't manifest in a way that prevented me from getting my nephew to go through his, but also if it's a fight, something is going very wrong somewhere, and the kid's not the person who is going to necessarily be able to figure it out.

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