Tuesday, September 27th, 2022
As it’s the start of a new school year some ideas for how to help your child with homework will hopefully be helpful.
Research shows that children are more successful in school when parents take an active interest in their homework**. Showing a keen, regular interest helps children to understand that what they are doing is important.
Helping with homework shouldn’t mean spending hours sat next to your child. While it’s important to show support and model good learning behaviours, there is a limit to how much help you can give. Children do need to have the opportunity to learn for themselves and doing the homework for them means that cannot happen as it should. So what can you do to prevent homework becoming a nightly battle ground?
Here are a few tips to help guide the way:
- Help them take responsibility by encouraging and supporting children to become more confident in completing homework tasks on their own, without constant parental input. This takes time but is worth persisting with. Help your child to see that homework is a learning opportunity. Parents can of course always make suggestions and and offer a helpful direction to follow but let your child do their own work.
- Offer constant praise and encouragement to your child and remain positive. This can have a greatly beneficial influence on your child’s approach to homework and indeed, learning in general.
- Model learning behaviour, if your children see you balancing your budget or even reading a book they are far more likely to follow that example with their own studies.
- Work with your child to create a ‘homework plan’ that works for you/them. It can include a regular study schedule, a suitable place in which to work, with minimal distractions, break times, time management so deadlines can be met and how to deal with any problems that arise. It may take a few goes before you find the ‘perfect’ fit but be flexible and you’ll get there!
- Life is busy but do all you can to create positive study habits by recognising the importance of homework and making sure proper time is allocated for homework to be completed without your child feeling they are missing out on more exciting family activities.
Hopefully theses ideas will help ease the homework load but if you find you are having on-going challenges then it’s probably worth having a chat with your child’s teacher and they will most likely be able to offer some specific suggestions to help resolve the difficulties.
** “The relation between parents’ involvement in children’s schooling and children’s adjustment: A meta-analysis.” Barger, Kim, Kuncel and Pomerantz 2019.
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