Well, the whole helping out with homework varies according to the stages of schooling of your kid. In elementary school it is quite essential for us parents to guide our kids with their homework. During that phase I strictly stuck to guiding them and making them understand what they are doing. If they make any mistakes then showing them how it’s wrong and guiding them on how it can be made right rather than out-rightly correcting their mistakes. This actually made their concepts strong, so by the time they were in high school I didn’t had to worry about their homework. Just an eye if they are completing it on time was enough. Cause from high school they have to develop their interests and know where their capabilities lie on their own. This did work out quite well.
@Wellspring
Sounds like we share the same kids. Ditto for us.
“I have never seen a student that was a B student in elementary that became a top student later on."
You need to get out more. I was a D student in elementary school and a C student my first two years of high school. I never got less than an A my last two years of high school and through college. I also a top student at my law school.
Some kids need more time to mature. Period.
“Has any parent helped substantially with College applications also? Ie Common App”
My cousins literally wrote all of their son’s college application essays. All of them. He hated writing, was immature stubborn and just wasn’t getting them done. Despite dire predictions from many, their kid did just what they thought would happen. Got into a top engineering program at a great school, never taking a class where he had to write anything, graduated and has been very successful working in a job where again he writes nothing longer than an e mail.
#83. I just don’t even know what to say. So incredibly dishonest. Frankly it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around that a parent would do that.
His “success” in college and career in no way justifies essentially cheating on the common app.
My cousins husband was very upfront about it and the dire predictions were more along the lines of “ if he can’t write his own essays he won’t be able to get through college alone” which they felt ( and saw) was just not true, but that doesn’t mean it was a proper thing to do.
My cousins husband was surprised how many people he talked to over the years admitted to writing at least one of their kids essays . I know colleges say they can tell when it’s written by an adult but my guess is they often can’t. But no way would my kids let me do that.
Yes. I rarely did except when they were little. But my…ummmm our paper in English got a B! It deserved an A. Ha!
I’ve heard from a friend that his relative, who is a humanities professor at a T10 school, wrote essays for her kid. This was presented to me by this friend as a common practice.
DH and I pretty much leave our kids alone for the most part. We have never helped with “normal” homework ever since they were in first grade. But that’s not b/c we have certain code or philosophy to follow, it’s just b/c we are lucky that our kids didn’t need help. If our kids needed help, we would give it in less than a heart beat. Who knows what kind of mother I would be had my kids needed constant reminder or support with homework? I don’t really know. You gotta do what you gotta do, everyone’s is different and you adjust your support based on the circumstances.
I’ve never seen a B on a test, quiz or project DD’s school work since she was in first grade. So there was no reason to get involved in that. They always take the highest level of whatever levels provided for their grade (math in middle school, or honor/AP classes for HS) without being told to. BUT what we are helping them with is the work outside of the regular school curricula. We encouraged them to take online courses, summer programs, or any extra work that has nothing to do with school work. Sometimes it’s for them to learn ahead, but most of the time it’s to allow them to take courses that the school doesn’t offer (discrete math, number theory, Python, Latin, etc…). If we have no major plans during holiday weekends (i.e president day weekend, MLK, etc.), we printed out SAT questions, AMC math problems and have our kids work on them between xbox, movies and other social activities. Surely they can spare a few hours working on academic stuff. This is an opportunity for my husband to explain to them new science/math concepts that they have never learned at school. Our kids are smart but they wouldn’t have the motivation on their own to find online resources to do extra study (But who knows if we didn’t do it they would have done it on their own anyway? Hard to say). Our job is to show them the world outside of the bubble they are in. We often told them that they may be the top of their class right now, but it is nothing when they go to college. There is a whole world of smarter people out there, and if they can do something now to better prepared for that world, then why not. They have the time now.
What irks me is situation where the kids are already independent and doing well in schools, but the parents can’t help themselves. They didn’t give the kids a chance to succeed (or fail) on their own. They are so busy cutting down the trees and not seeing the entire forest being at risk (lame analogy lol). I think it’s completely okay to be over the top parents, as long as you take a pause once in a while for the kid to harvest the investment that you have worked so hard for. Or see how ineffective your method was if they “failed” the moment you let go of being over their shoulder. Not being flexible with the approach is just not fair for everyone involved. I have a friend whose kid is also a friend of our DD. The kid is extremely independent and smart, but the mom is a typical tiger mom. She is also a nagger. Do this do that constantly and wouldn’t allow the girl to have any social life. She is taking credit for the fact that her daughter got accepted to UPenn this year. (She pushed her daughter to re-take SAP multiple times until she got 1590. Mine got 1530 the first time and I told her that’s good enough lol). We will never know for sure if her daughter would have gotten into UPenn on her own, I would like to think she would still have, but who knows. On the other hand, maybe mine would have gotten into Yale/Harvard had we “pushed” our kids further? Who knows, but i am okay with mine going to non-ivies. That was never the goal for us
The answer to the question is Yes. I have certainly seen projects purportedly done by children that were almost certainly done by parents. Not a good way for the kids to learn.
However, I have always thought these questions were more complicated than they seem. My goal as a parent has been to help my kids prepare to be successful, productive, happy adults. It was not to get them into the most prestigious schools but to help them find paths that helped them prepare for happy, successful, productive adult lives.
Schools themselves have several functions but I will highlight two: education and sorting (e.g., grades, honors v. non-honors classes, college admissions, grad school admissions). Many schools and parents (especially parents on CC) focus too heavily on the sorting aspect and imbue the sorting process with some kind of moral or scientific power. I view the sorting just as means, not ends. Moreover, the sorting process is far from imperfect.
The parent described in #83 recognized that they could help the kid get to the place where he was a successful, productive and hopefully happy adult life if they didn’t ask him to do the thing he could not do well, which was write essays. Once past the artificial sorting hurdle, they thought, he would be successful. The only problem: the kid or adult probably signed something saying the work was done by the kid.
I had a very different situation – a truly gifted kid who was/is severely dyslexic. Reading and writing physically hurt him. The sorting process the schools have was often dysfunctional. They would keep him out of enrichment math early on because he was slow at math problems but made change for Monopoly in his head before kindergarten could multiply exponentials in grade 2. So, we needed to get the schools to alter the processes in some ways. I’ll spart yo details, but he got into an elite LAC with minimal distribution requirements, performed at the highest levels (the first summa his advisor had given in 18 years), started his first company while in school, attended the best grad school/MBA program in the world for what he did, started his second company while in grad school and has been nationally recognized. He’s not about making money (could have gone the hedge fund route if he were) and I’m not implying it is the metric for success but his net worth on paper at age 28 probably exceeds the vast bulk of CC parents. We just needed to help him navigate around and through dumb sorting processes.
@Nhatrang, it seems unlikely that the difference between 1530 and 1590 made any difference, but they may also have pushed her to do other stuff that helped. However, the main point isn’t to have kids succeed because of your help, but to give them the skills and help them get into a position to succeed given their talents and skills.
Incidentally, I know kids who are completely left alone academically by parents starting very early, but I know of one distinguished academic and his wife who helped with his daughter’s papers through college – I suspect they did for their son as well, but I didn’t hear about that. Incidentally, sometimes the kids who are left alone show signs (at least from my outside observer’s point of view) of lacking guidance later on (e.g., when picking majors, jobs, etc.).
I taught my kid to use Excel when he was in second grade.He did all the electrical kits from Radio Shack on his onwn in elementary school and knew more than I did about capacitors and resistors even though I took college physics. I’m sure there were parents who thought we helped with science fair projects. And we did in the sense that we gave him the tools and the materials long before the project was even conceived.
Homework is highly overrated, at least in the US. There’s too much of it in high school without really adding much to learning. The founder of Khan Academy (Salman Khan) when interviewed a few years back said he found two things correlated with happier students, better outcomes - family dinner and sleep. And homework gets in the way of both, so he started his company based on that as a goal.
You can’t judge and not judge btw, you can’t say in the same post every situation is different so parents shouldn’t be judged because we don’t know what goes on inside each family (true), and then start judging other parents (bad).
@theloniusmonk There was a study a few years back which showed that USA students had more homework than kids in most industrialized countries, yet they were fairly low in performance. Basically, USA students weren’t under-performing compared to other countries because they were lazy, but because they were wasting time in mindless repetitions of the same stuff instead of learning and mastering concepts.
So yes, not only is homework overrated, it’s counterproductive, at least the way it is used in the USA.
@MWolf, Alfie Cohen has at least one book making the assertion that homework doesn’t enhance learning. I remember being skeptical but thinking the evidence was pretty strong.
Yes, Of course, it’s really true for some times. Usually, parents ever cross a line by helping too much with schoolwork. because some children used to this habit. They can not struggle themselves.
Giving advice to your child and handholding them are two completely different things. I’ve come across many instances where parents feared that their kids won’t be capable of getting good grades on their own and resorted to ‘over-parenting’. I think parents need to learn how to trust their kids and be okay with the fact that they will make mistakes. That’s the best way to learn, after all.
I agree, struggling is part of growing up and a lesson that needs to be learned sooner than later.
I have no problem admitting that when my grade school kids had lots of homework and his language arts assignment included coloring in a picture, that I colored in the picture. I also did work on the diorama part of his book report. Why?, you might ask, because my child should be working on language art skills in his language arts homework, not ART! When teachers assign stupid busy work that has nothing to do with what the students are supposed to be learning and being assessed on, it’s busy work. I have no problem freeing my child up to focus on important homework by completing stupid assignments that are used to decorate the classroom. Luckily these assignments tended to disappear in middle school and high school. I also helped edit essays when they first started writing. They were never taught how to organize an essay, so I worked with them so they knew how to, and what a good essay was like. By the time they graduated high school, they could do it on their own, but not because they were taught it at school, it was because I was involved. I also helped my kids make note cards to quiz themselves before a test, they learned from me how to study. If parents focus on helping their kids learn how to do things right, how to teach themselves, how to study, how to prioritize what assignments are busy work vs. those that are worthwhile, it’s all great involvement. I must have done something right, I have two kids succeeding at OSU in mechanical engineering.
Our elementary school had at least one Creativity Fair every year. Kids from K-5 would have tables with projects on them. Completely voluntary. Every year there would be a few tables where the project was obviously done by a parent…you could see the poor kids sitting there, totally disengaged, by their booths.
I found it really sad.