Pros and Cons of Helping Your Child With Homework

Should your kids learn everything they need to know from their professors during school hours itself? Should you guide them with their studies at home whenever they face difficulty in understanding a crucial concept?

According to a recent study, most parents are unsure of what their role should be when it comes to assisting their kids with homework. If you are a parent of a school-going child, it’s most likely that you will go far beyond your limits to provide your child with all the necessary study help he or she might need.  Parental help with homework definitely helps a child to understand specific concepts in a better way.

However, there are always two sides to a coin.

As you can see, there are some advantages and well as disadvantages of guiding your child in their academic tasks. The best thing you can do is to know the pros and cons and make informed decisions to guide your child in the best possible way.

Advantages of assisting your child with homework

Research suggests that students spend more time on their homework when parents show active involvement in their academic tasks. US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement state that homework help is not only a mere chance for the parents to review the student’s learning at school.

Parental involvement becomes crucial for a child’s growth and development due to various reasons.

• It provides an opportunity to cultivate student-parent relationship
• Homework gives you an insight into your child’s development in school.
• Regular involvement with your child’s homework will keep you connected with his/her curriculum and help you to evaluate his/her progress.
• A parent’s involvement with homework also helps to impart in the child time the much needed time management skills. This lifetime skill helps them to finish any time-bound assignment before deadline.
• Knowing your child’s syllabus and curriculum helps you to evaluate his progress and participate in parent teacher’s meetings more actively.
• In-depth knowledge about your child’s problems will help you to give them the best guidance they need to excel in academics.

Through all these aforementioned aspects become vital during a student’s developing years, there’s a catch. You must refrain from crossing the fine line of difference between helping your child with homework to writing the whole assignment for them altogether.

This is when your wholehearted genuine intention of guiding your child toward success fails miserably and deems counterproductive.

Disadvantages of assisting your child with homework

You must ensure that you are not completing your child’s assignments for them but only guiding them in the initial stage so that they eventually manage to do it on their own. Once your help becomes a habit for them, it will only enhance their inconvenience to tackle complex academic tasks on their own. You need to understand when to step back.

Know the circumstances you should avoid to provide positive guidance to your child.

• Too much help during the developing years can lead them to feel incompetent when they struggle with complex tasks in the future.
• Excessive guidance can create enormous pressure and anxiety in a child as he/she learns to accept nothing less than A+ grades
• Unnecessary guidance restricts a child from developing one extremely crucial life skill, i.e. dealing with failures.
• When you become obsessed with the responsibility of making your child happy and successful, you might unknowingly make him/her a victim of helicopter parenting.
• Not learning to manage the workload can limit a child’s sense of responsibility towards homework and lead to poorer performance during adolescent years.
• Research shows that students tend to have higher rates of depression and reduced life satisfaction when they do not learn to take autonomy over their decisions.

It’s quite understandable that you will want to help your child when you see they are struggling with their homework. However, as a parent, you must know where to draw the line.

W. E. B. Du Bois had rightly said, “Education must not simply teach work – it must teach Life.”Simply solving the challenging academic tasks will not empower your child in any way but only hinder their growth. Help them to develop strong study habits and positive attitudes towards education and teach them to tackle challenges confidently and deal with failures gracefully.