3 Reasons Why Parents Are Better Off Not Doing Homework With Their Kids

Many parents believe that if they don’t control the process of doing homework, their kid will study badly. But the researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and Duke proved the opposite. They have been collecting data about how the involvement of parents in the teaching process affects marks and found out that parents’ assistance is useless during primary school and affects the examination results negatively in secondary and high school.

Bright Side is going to tell you why a child (and not their parents) should be responsible for their homework.

1. A child loses their motivation to study.

According to the results of this research, the more parents are involved in the process of doing homework with their kids, the less the child will want to learn. Children whose parents sit next to them and tell them what to do, controlling every step and even doing homework for them, have the lowest motivation. However, schoolchildren whose parents don’t “press” them have a bigger desire to learn something new.

As a parent, try to loosen the reins and only help if your kid asks for it themselves. In this case, you should explain to the kid what they didn’t understand but you shouldn’t do the task for them. If your kid can’t stand doing homework, a psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya recommends “joining” their emotions: admit that they’re right to not want to rewrite that boring paragraph or to write the same letter 10 lines in a row. After that, teach them “to swallow a frog” (which means to cope with difficult and unpleasant situations) by sharing your own method of fulfilling unwanted tasks.

2. They don’t learn to be responsible.

By making your kid do homework, controlling the process and punishing them for bad marks, you take on their responsibility to study, which means you remove it from your child. Therefore, as long as you are there controlling them, the kid won’t take on the responsibility.

According to Lyudmila Petranovskaya, raising a kid by using “a carrot on a stick”, doesn’t do them any favors because it can affect their perception of things in their adult life. Punishment and praises should be there so that a person knows what to choose from. Let the consequences happen. “Have you forgotten that a teacher said to draw a picture? It means you’ll have to do it instead of playing computer games. Have you not done your homework? Explain that to your teacher yourself.” The ability to be responsible for your own actions and to appropriately distribute your attention and time to the future is more important than the ability to clearly execute other people’s tasks.

3. The relationship between parents and kids spoils.

“Homework is done. Mother lost her voice. Daughter is deafened from screaming. Neighbors learned the poem by heart. And the dog retold everything,” is a joke many of us have heard before. But when it comes to doing homework with your kid, it is actually not all that funny. Instead of controlling each task, psychologists recommend building a trusting relationship with your kid and spending more time together. Read aloud, discuss things happening in science and in the world, and find new interesting things to do together.

If you are not willing to accept any marks but an ’A’, ask yourself why you feel so strongly about it. Children don’t feel loved in families where a bad mark can completely change the way they’re treated. Psychologists say that studying is the personal task of each kid, while the personal task of parents is to love their child unconditionally. Love is more important than marks, isn’t it?

How do you motivate your kids if they don’t want to do their homework? Please tell us about your secrets of raising kids in the comments!