“Homework is for the children.” A mother in Ireland condemned parents for doing their children’s homework in a Facebook rant, which quickly went viral but has since been taken down.
Sarah Thompson, a 37-year-old mother-of-three from County Armagh in Northern Ireland, has been taking her “brood” to the same primary school “for forever”, reports Belfast Live.
“You’d think I’d have learnt,” she told the camera. She was referring to the string of school assignments in which children have to make something – for example, build their own houses – that keep coming around.
“You think I would have learnt to keep them to pass onto the next child, but I haven’t.”
After attending a presentation of her four-year-old son Noah’s class, where children showed off the houses they’d built using materials found around the home, Thompson posted a video to Facebook reminding parents: “Homework is for the children.”
She said Noah spent a week building his project from scratch – that he “was delighted with his work” – only to be shown up by houses that had clearly received some help.
“When Noah took his house project into school he was devastated because of a number of the other kids’ projects where like something from Grand Designs,” she said in the video, The Mirror reports.
“After seeing other homeworks he thought his was rubbish. It just broke my heart”
The other side of the argument, of course, is that increasing volumes of homework is a burden to children and taking away from family time.
A Young Australians Survey, released earlier this year, showed Australian school kids aged 10-13 are doing 40 more minutes a week of homework than they were 10 years ago, according to Herald Sun. On average, these ‘tweens’ are working four hours each week on school assignments.
In October last year, author and columnist wrote an article about the amount of homework stealing her children – in Years 10, eight, three, and Kindergarten – from time with the family.
“The demands of homework for our children are relentless, and I’m turning into the master nagger that I do not like as I push all the kids to their study tables with varying degrees of success,” she wrote for The Australian.
“It feels like our kids are working as hard as we do during the day, but they aren’t getting the essential, replenishing circuitbreaker time after school. What are we doing to them, especially at primary school level?”
As with most things, the answer around how much homework children should be given – and how much help parents might provide –
likely lies somewhere in the middle.
In the meantime, however, Thompson’s video attracted more than 19,000 times and hundreds of comments.
What do you think about parents helping their kids with homework? Tell us in the comments below.
Top Comments
Homework is supposed to demonstrate what the child can do on their own. A teacher can hardly give an accurate assessment of their students' abilities if they're actually assessing the parents' abilities. Having said that, I've seen kids sent home with homework concepts that haven't even been taught in class yet (mainly because there is an expactation of work being sent home, so they just send anything), and it's obviously going to be difficult, if not impossible, for the child to do unassisted. As a parent and a teacher, I dont like the idea of homework unless it's finishing off work from class time. Apart from spending time with family and having time to play freely, there are many life skills that can and should be taught at home that are not a part of the school curriculum. These life skills can only be developed if kids are not bombarded with endless amounts of deskwork every afternoon.
The amount of homework that young kids receive here in the States is staggering! I have friends with elementary age children that get stuck with an hour or more of homework every night! I rarely if ever had homework in elementary school, usually it would be worksheets or something we didn't finish class. We did have to build a model once in fifth grade for our town's centennial celebration, everyone was assigned a building in town. I got our middle school, which used to be the high school, so it was huge. I got very little help from my parents, I drew the outlines on cardboard and my dad cut it out, because who trusts a 5th grader with and Exacto knife? But I put it all together and painted it, did the landscaping, everything. I was and still am a perfectionist, so I got top marks. But a lot of other kids got help from their parents (meaning the parents made it) and you could tell. Luckily our teachers could tell who actually made theirs and who didn't, the ones whose parents made theirs were forced to do the project over again. That would never happen today.