SHOULD YOU HELP YOUR KIDS
With Their Homework?
By Tanni Haas, Ph.D.
H
ere is a scenario most parents can relate to: it’s
late afternoon and your children come home
from school exhausted, weighed down like
turtles by school bags full of homework. What do you
do: 1) sit down to help them with it or 2) encourage
them to do it on their own? Why? Researchers believe that parental assistance with
homework for children in elementary school helps
because they are young and impressionable, and your
help is about more than just completing the homework:
you are also teaching them how to study in the first
place.
The answer to the question is “It depends.” In the most
comprehensive summary of the scientific literature to
date, researchers from Duke University concluded that
whether or not parents should help their children with
their homework depends on: 1) the grade level of the
children, 2) how knowledgeable parents are about the
subject matter of the homework, and 3) how parents go
about helping their children with it. 1 The situation is quite different when it comes to high-
school-aged students. Here, researchers speculate that
your involvement adds value because you are only likely
to help out when you have particular expertise to share.
Before you sit down with your children to help them
with their homework, you should consider their age.
Sounds cryptic? Surprising as it may seem, researchers
have consistently found that homework assistance is
beneficial for children in elementary and high school,
only not for middle-school-aged children. So if your
children are in middle school, you are better off letting
them do their homework on their own.
10 | V O L U S I A parent M A G A Z I N E
1
Why, then, would it be detrimental for you to sit
down with your middle-schoolers to help them out
with their homework? Here, researchers think that the
issue is their specific developmental stage. As budding
teenagers caught between childhood and adulthood,
middle-school-aged children have a strong need for
autonomy and are likely to resist any effort on your
part to interfere in their affairs.
As the father of a 14-year-old son who is about to enter
high school, I recognize these behaviors from my own
experiences. When my son was in elementary school, he
Erika Patall et al, "Parent Involvement in Homework: A Research Synthesis," Review of Educational Research.