The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It

by Sara Bennett

“Parents feel so helpless about homework because they don’t want to undermine the teacher’s authority,” explains associate professor in early childhood education Olga Jarrett. “As a parent, one wants to be supportive.”

“The principal told me that it is really the parents’ job to educate their children and that his teachers are only facilitators,” says Melinda, the mother of two kids in public school in New Orleans, Louisiana. “He said that they purposely send home a lot of work that is over the kids’ heads so that the parents will get involved with the kids and teach them at home.

So why is the school system relying on us? If we wouldn’t want an unqualified person teaching our kids during the day, why would we want one doing it at night—especially when that person is also tired and distracted? After all, it’s not easy to explain how to do fractions while you’re trying to get dinner on the table and perhaps take care of an infant at the same time.

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that cheating on homework and tests has become epidemic.

“When you start homework in kindergarten, there’s no kid on the face of the earth who can do it on his own.

We don’t like what homework has done to our kids or ourselves. But once we’ve become enforcers or enablers, it can be difficult to turn back.

“There’s a weakness in kids now. They can’t do anything without their parents and don’t want to, unless they develop a real rebellious streak,”

In fact, some parents even buy extra copies of their kids’ college textbooks so that they can help with homework, and Lisa Jacobson of Inspirica says that some actually hire tutors to edit their kids’ college papers. College administrators shake their heads and beg parents to cut the umbilical cord. But we’ve been involved in our children’s work for so long, it seems natural for us to continue ad infinitum.

We’re quick to blame television, along with computer and video games, for turning our kids into couch potatoes. But what about all the “homework potatoes” out there, parked in one place while they hit the books for hour after hour, evening after evening?

In fact, “there is absolutely no physiological difference between watching TV and doing homework,”

Lots of kids do play organized sports at school or elsewhere. But as these teams have become more competitive, those children who aren’t highly skilled are often made to stay on the bench,

When kids want to take a break from studying and burn off some steam and calories, many parents don’t allow it. Over and over, parents told us their house rule is “homework first.” So kids remain captive to homework, stealthily taking breaks to IM friends or play games on their computer so they look like they’re still studying.

After hours bent over their books, the last thing most kids want to do is go out and play. Often, it’s too late anyway.

So what do they do? Like many of us, they collapse on the couch. “After I’m done, the only thing I want to do is watch TV or go on the computer,” says Allison, the ninth-grader from Brooklyn, New York. “I don’t feel like reading because that’s a majority of my homework. I don’t want to do anything that resembles homework. All I want to do is relax and rest my brain.”

After all, as we know all too well, it’s hard to challenge society’s assumption that homework is always such a positive thing.

Another reason kids arrive home exhausted: the huge load of books overflowing their backpacks.

those who engaged in five hours of physical activity per week had better math scores than the control group who engaged in physical activity for just forty minutes per week—even though the first group spent 14 percent less time in class.

students who scored higher on a state-mandated fitness test also scored higher on the SAT-9 standardized reading and math tests.

Decreasing time spent on academics so that physical activity could be increased had no negative effects on academic achievement, according to the CDC review.

Exercise also has a significant impact on the development of the brain’s frontal lobe, which controls what scientists call executive function or a child’s decision-making abilities. “This has a direct effect on problem-solving,”

Executive function is also linked to self-control and being able to delay gratification. Kids with better executive function are able to control the urge to get up, talk to their friends, or disrupt class, and are better able to sit still long enough to do their schoolwork. Of course, such impulse control is also helpful in other aspects of life, such as resisting peer pressure to do drugs.

“When she does her homework, she has all these little snacks on her bed,” reports her mom. “When she watches TV, she’s not aware of what she eats. When she does homework, it’s the same thing. I think she’s eating to comfort herself. It’s her way of self-medicating.”

“These kids aren’t able to use exercise to raise their levels of those feel-good brain chemicals called endorphins. So they grab the nearest junk food, which does the same thing—but with negative consequences.”

Unfortunately, these escape routes can become addictive. Kids could be building bad habits that last a lifetime. “The more kids cope with stress by eating, watching TV, playing video games, or surfing the net, the more they reinforce those behaviors,”

there’s a growing black market for Ritalin, Adderall, and other ADHD drugs. Kids without the disorder buy pills from friends with prescriptions to improve their concentration and get through mountains of work.

Even when our children are in bed, they might not be resting peacefully. Lots of parents reported to us that their elementary, middle, and even high schoolers have a hard time falling asleep, anxious that they haven’t studied hard enough for a test or done well enough on an essay.

Chronic sleep loss increases a child’s risk of depression, impaired motor function, and even obesity (a fatigued body doesn’t produce enough leptin, a hormone that controls appetite).

sixth-graders who got consistently less sleep also had lower grades.

kids in grades six through twelve who got insufficient sleep were more likely to get lower grades, while 80 percent of those who got the optimal amount achieved As and Bs in school.

When normally high-achieving six- to twelve-year-olds were limited to just eight hours of sleep each night over a period of one week as part of a Brown Medical School experiment in 2005, they immediately started exhibiting attention problems, had trouble recalling old material, learning new lessons, and completing high-quality work.

If children need one hour of exercise each day and ten to eleven hours of sleep each night, yet are burdened with several hours of homework, something has to give. “It should be homework, not their health,”

But even if you can’t cut your child’s workload, you can still help guarantee he gets enough exercise by breaking the “homework first rule.” Make sure kids have an opportunity to play actively for at least thirty minutes (an hour is even better) immediately after school,

“If your kid needs to stay up late two or three nights during the school year, that’s fine,” says Dr. Taras. “But if it’s happening two or three times a week, parents need to give their kids permission to put the work down and go to bed.”

Luckily, any academic effects of homework-induced sleep deprivation can usually be reversed as soon as a child starts getting enough rest.

In an effort to push children academically, schools are pushing them beyond what’s developmentally appropriate in both their class work and homework. In fact, homework is just the tip of an iceberg of school pressure that’s been weighing on our children all day long, squashing their spirits and their love of learning.

Children are expected to master skills in earlier and earlier grades to meet government standards, or just to live up to the school’s own “rigorous” ones.

Of course, the schools aren’t completely to blame. Not wanting our children to fall behind, many of us have jumped onto the accelerated learning bandwagon with both feet, convinced it will help turn our kids into superachievers, or at least keep up with the others.

“The evidence shows very clearly that kids learn different skills at different times, just like they learn to walk and talk at different times,” says Steve Nelson, head of the progressive Calhoun School in New York City. “Yet those who make up these strict curriculums and standardized tests act as though they think kids should all be at the same developmental level at the same time.”

Today, many youngsters are expected to enter kindergarten already knowing their letters and numbers. As a result, some preschool programs have abolished naps to allow for more instructional time.

“Kindergarten is so strict. I can’t even describe how intense it is. Kids are expected to read when they leave kindergarten. It’s changed our whole curriculum. We don’t have snack in the afternoon, we have one recess a day, and that’s maybe for ten minutes. By the afternoon, the kids are saying, ‘I’m hungry, I’m tired.’ But our schedule doesn’t include time for snack, for play, for rest.”

“When a young child is asked to master purely intellectual tasks that are abstracted from the physical, concrete world, they have no meaning for him.” That’s why any noticeable academic boost usually fades in a few years, and later learners quickly catch up.

kids who had attended academically oriented preschools earned significantly lower grades than those who had attended more old-fashioned, “child-initiated” preschool classes, where the emphasis was on play.

The key to developing literacy—and all other skills—is to pace the learning so that it is consistent with the child’s development,

“If pushed beyond their developmental limits, children are going to feel stupid,” says child psychologist Lawrence Cohen. “And as soon as you feel stupid, you’re not very effective at learning anything.”

We can’t force a child to sit still in a restaurant before he’s developmentally ready (and sometimes, not even then). So why do we expect him to be able to sit still at school for hours, then come home and do it again for homework?

71 percent of the country’s school districts have reduced or eliminated music, art, social studies, and/or science to make more time for reading and math.

“I’m enraged with the slogan No Child Left Behind. My children are left behind. They will pass the test and go on to the next grade. But they are left with a yearning not for learning or reading but to get out of school. This is not what I want for my children.”

You’d think vomit-covered test booklets might make school officials reconsider whether kids are really developmentally ready to handle such stress. But, no: The tests must go on, despite dire consequences to our kids and the way testing requires them to be taught.