Ask the Expert: A Better Way? or Whose Work Is It?
Friday, October 16, 2009
By: Hal Runkel

One mom wants to know how much involvement is too much with her child's assignements.

My nine-year old child doesn’t seem to make doing his homework a priority. Sometimes he misses deadlines on assignments. I just want to sit there and watch that he completes his schoolwork. Is this the best strategy?

Not if you want his homework to become his priority. The homework battle seems to plague every house in the world. This is because we as a society put so much stock in the education process. But the problem has very little to do with school. Homework just happens to provide a very convenient territory on which to battle for control. Who’s life is this? That’s the real question here. We parents are reluctant to give over this area of life to our children because we fear they will never take it as seriously as they need to (or we need them to). 

We then allow this fear to shape our vision of the future, wondering if they’ll ever get an education, if they’ll ever get a job, and so on. So, we think, we had better nip this lack of motivation thing right in the bud, right now, by forcing them to do homework and get good grades, even if it means hovering over them every night until they’re eighteen! What inevitably happens, however, is that we actually prevent them from ever adopting their education as their own. 

As long as we feel responsible for them and their education (which we equate with their whole future!), then they never feel responsible for themselves. But when we can calm our anxiety about their school, then we can be responsible to them in new ways. This means offering to help but only if they request it. This means inquiring about progress but in the same way we might ask a friend about how their job is going. This means pursuing our own life and our own continuing education.