Maria Guido has a message for teachers: “don’t bother sending it home, I’m not forcing my grade-schooler to do homework.” In her article of the same title published on Scary Mommy, she details why she is against this common school practice.
“Schooling is mandatory, homework for elementary children isn’t,” she said. “And forcing my 5-year-old child to sit down and concentrate on homework after he’s already spent six hours at school is something I actually have control over.”
Her house, her rules.
Doing school work at home is basically an extended period of begging children focus. No thanks, said Maria.
Everyday kids are being sent home with loads of school work waiting to be done, but Maria says that you have an option to opt out.
She says, “So often we fall into this ‘must follow the rules’ mentality when it comes to dealing with any kind of bureaucracy that we forget that we actually have choices.”
Maria then mentions Heather Shumaker’s article, “Why Parents Should Not Make Kids Do Homework.”
A comprehensive study by Duke University psychologist and neuroscientist Harris Cooper revealed that homework’s benefits are highly age dependent.
“High schoolers benefit if the work is under two hours a night, middle schoolers receive a tiny academic boost, and elementary-aged kids? It’s better to wait.”
Then Maria cites a research reviewed by The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss on the effects of homework on children.
“First, no research has ever found a benefit to assigning homework (of any kind or in any amount) in elementary school,” Valerie said.
“In fact, there isn’t even a positive correlation between, on the one hand, having younger children do some homework (vs. none), or more (vs. less), and, on the other hand, any measure of achievement.”
She argues that if parents are making our children 12 and below do homework, it’s that they were misinformed about what the evidence says or because they think kids ought to have to do homework despite what the evidence says.
Maria ends her argument by asking, “So what are we doing?”
She says that parents like her are doing what they’re told—but why?
“If we know our elementary-aged kids aren’t even focusing on their homework, much less finishing it or benefiting from it—why are we making them do it? I have no idea.”
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