Homework Headaches

Every day when my children get home from school, I pull the fresh baked cookies from the oven, pour everyone a glass of milk and we all sit around talking about how wonderful their school day was. They focus on the day’s homework and even study for tests that are days away.

Let me put the virtual breaks on this story before I get too carried away.

Afternoons at my house are far from the fairy tale we read about in books and sometimes see on TV.

I have four children, who attend two different schools — one in public and three in private. They all arrive home at the same time and the chaos ensues. My three youngest, who currently carry the busiest athletic schedules, have homework every night.

My first and second graders typically have a worksheet, maybe two at most, and reading. Pretty easy. They can also be easily persuaded to finish. No homework, no snack. No homework, no TV. No homework, no playing outside with friends. Their young, feeble minds seem to comprehend this policy pretty well.

As for my third grader, there is no form of persuasion that works for him. In case you’ve never had a third grader, or you’ve forgotten what your third grade experience was like, it’s a year of transition. A year of learning to be more independent with your studies and the degree of difficulty jumps up significantly.

My son comes home with at least two math worksheets, spelling, penmanship, and at least one, usually two, tests or quizzes to study for each night. While this doesn’t sound like something that could take all night, for my son it does. He spends a good hour wandering around offering to help his siblings with their homework, and probably another 20 or 30 minutes trying to decide if he wants to actually start, or procrastinate some more.

It typically takes him about three hours, sometimes more, to finish all of his work. If he has hockey practice, he’s usually up until 9 p.m. trying to finish everything, all because he procrastinates.

His study habits put everyone in my family in a tight spot. We can’t listen to music, we can’t have TV noise in the background, and we can’t play a game in our kitchen or living room, all because he gets too distracted. In addition, being a sports family, we always have a game or practice we need to attend and when he can’t get his work done, it puts me in a challenging position as a parent.

I decided to seek advice on this problem from educator Lori Willard, reading specialist at School in the . She advised me to try setting a timer for my son to get some down time right after he comes home.

“It sounds as if he’s used to a more structured environment at school, and probably needs to decompress at the end of the day,” she said.

She suggested also using a timer when children come to the table to get their work done.

“Give them a specific amount of time to do each subject so they don’t get tired of sitting there for an extended amount of time,” Willard added.

She also encouraged me to sit down with him after each subject was complete to go over it and make sure he had done it correctly and understood it. One piece of advice that she offered that stood out to me was to “offer the incentive of a break in between each subject for finishing before the allotted time.”

When I asked Willard how to decrease distractions with multiple children in a household, she offered to keep everyone on the same homework schedule, even if it’s just a “learning time, as opposed to actual homework time.”

Give other children the option of working on penmanship or reading, as long as it’s some sort of quiet downtime. Again she recommended keeping this time limited so the children don’t get antsy from sitting so long.

As I sit and ponder if her advice will work for my son, other questions arise in the “sports mom” side of my brain.

• Do I let him attend the game or practice even he hasn’t finished his homework?
• Do I let him stay home with his older sister and have her supervise his studies? (And is that really fair to her?)
• Do I bring him along (if it’s a sibling’s event) and force him to attempt to do homework in public?

Of course I want my children to continue to be active and do the sports they love, but obviously I want to teach them that school work has to come before any extracurricular activities.