How to do homework: how to help your children?

It’s no secret that mod­ern par­ents over­whelm­ing­ly help their chil­dren with their home­work. How­ev­er, under the help every­one under­stands his own. Some­one decides every­thing him­self, giv­ing the child only to rewrite what has been done, and some­one orga­nizes it cor­rect­ly, moti­vates his child to suc­cess­ful­ly com­plete the task. How to do home­work cor­rect­ly, and how can par­ents help a stu­dent with­out harm­ing him?

Pros and cons

In fact, there is no uni­ty among par­ents in answer­ing the ques­tion of whether it is nec­es­sary to help your child do home­work. Some­one will say that it is nec­es­sary. Anoth­er will answer that by solv­ing the prob­lems of knowl­edge for him, the child will not increase in the head. As usu­al, the truth lies some­where in the mid­dle.

The sci­en­tists, whose find­ings were pub­lished in the jour­nal Psi­cothe­ma, were look­ing for an answer to the ques­tion of whether par­ents should help their chil­dren with their home­work. As a result, they found that stu­dents who were helped with their home­work had low­er aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance. Fam­i­ly assis­tance does not ensure aca­d­e­m­ic suc­cess of stu­dents, but how this assis­tance is pro­vid­ed, in what way and in what vol­ume is of great impor­tance.

Anoth­er study, the data of which was pub­lished in Revista medico-chirur­gi­cale a Soci­etatii de Medici si Nat­u­ral­isti din Iasi, focused on study­ing the dura­tion of home­work prepa­ra­tion and breaks in it. So, it was found that half of the sur­veyed ele­men­tary school stu­dents do “home­work” with­out a break, but the rest are inter­rupt­ed by com­put­er games and watch­ing TV, which makes chil­dren even more tir­ing and is an unhy­gien­ic way to take breaks when doing home­work.

Homework Rules

From the fore­go­ing, we can con­clude that the main task of par­ents is to allow the child to work out the acquired knowl­edge in prac­tice, but to cre­ate for him all the nec­es­sary con­di­tions for this and make sure that the child is engaged in a use­ful thing for him, with­out being dis­tract­ed by any­thing else.

All elec­tron­ic gad­gets must be removed from the child. So there will be no temp­ta­tion to be dis­tract­ed by a com­put­er game or write off the cor­rect answer to a giv­en prob­lem.

Many par­ents doubt whether it is nec­es­sary to give the child the oppor­tu­ni­ty to relax after school, or should they imme­di­ate­ly put him for lessons upon return­ing home? Of course, if there are no adults at home, as is the case in fam­i­lies where both par­ents work, then the child rarely sits down for lessons on his own, wait­ing for mom and dad to come home from work. This is espe­cial­ly true for those chil­dren whose par­ents help with home­work. If he knows that he can rely only on his own strength, he will be able to orga­nize him­self much faster, espe­cial­ly if the fam­i­ly has a method of encour­age­ment and pro­hi­bi­tions. For exam­ple, he did not do his home­work — he did not play com­put­er games.

A par­ent can help with sched­ul­ing home­work. The child must under­stand how often reg­u­lar tasks need to be solved, which tasks have a high­er pri­or­i­ty, dead­lines. When a stu­dent clear­ly sees what lessons he needs to do, this gives him con­fi­dence in his abil­i­ties.

It is nec­es­sary to explain that it is bet­ter to start doing home­work with the most dif­fi­cult sub­ject and not to leave for lat­er what can be done today. It makes sense to break up volu­mi­nous tasks into parts, but here par­ents need to make sure that the stu­dent com­pletes a cer­tain part every day.

Of course, there are times when you sim­ply can­not do with­out the help of adults. If the child was first asked to do some kind of project on a com­put­er, then you need to sit down with him and fig­ure out the tech­ni­cal part, but he must work on fill­ing it out him­self. In the case of solv­ing com­plex prob­lems, push for an answer, but do not solve every­thing for him.

What helps chil­dren learn well? Moti­va­tion and faith in strength, encour­age­ment and praise. This is what every par­ent can and should give to their child.