How 5th Grade Homework nearly broke my soul, and How we fixed it.

Let me paint you a picture. It’s 4:15pm. The biggest of the kids just walked in the door, dropped their backpack directly in the middle of the doorway like a tiny passive-aggressive landmine, and announced they have a project due tomorrow. A big one. Full Disclosure, I probably got emails the past three Wednesdays from his teacher, that I had no intention of reading, and my kid certainly wasn’t going to tell me, but now he’s losing his shit… A. Because He doesn’t want to work on it, and B. Because I’m not helping him, even though I found out about it 4.3 seconds ago and he hasn’t ASKED me for help yet. This is fun.

I should read these emails, but I’ve got stuff and things and this two page newsletter is the last thing I can think about most of the time. I’m a shit mom, and I’ve fully made peace with that.

Cool. Cool cool cool.

I spent a full school year in homework hell, a ride my husband has also been on, before I finally accepted that what I was doing wasn’t working. The nagging wasn’t working. The raising of voices from multiple directions was stressful and going no where, The token system that worked for years is in the wind, because we’re living someplace new and shitty while we work on a move out of the country and no one has the bandwidth for it. I’m taken back to my own childhood where adults regularly reminded me I wouldn’t “always have a calculator on” me…. That turned out to be bullshit, and I know full well my kids will literally always have a calculator on them as adults. Don’t get me wrong, I want them to learn this stuff, but that doesn’t mean I believe they should have to come home after 7 hours of school to spend another hour working on homework.

We do the homework when it works for us now. On days when there is martial arts in the evenings, or basketball on the weekend, we don’t make them do homework.

Here are a few things that worked on top of not forcing it every day….

1. Stop Fighting About WHERE They Do It.

I liked the idea of them doing homework at the kitchen table. We’re in a tiny ass apartment since we sold our house to get ready to move. The kitchen table is clear when we’re not eating there, and there are limited distractions… no visible screens anywhere…… It’s a great place to do math homework, because we can sit with them, but reading homework…. we now let them do that from wherever they want. The caveat, is that when the reading is done, I’m going to ask them about what they read, and if they can’t answer basic questions, we read it again… together.

2. The Snack-First Rule

They just spent 7 hours holding it together at school. Their blood sugar is in the basement. Feed them first, always. No snack = no functional human. This is not negotiable in our house. We eat dinner about an hour after getting home, so its a small snack… maybe apple slices, so we don’t have to argue about them not eating dinner a little later, but the snack happens.

3. A Routine they can count on…

My Kids know they don’t have to do homework on Tuesday, Thursday or Sunday. If It’s important, we’ll prioritize it for another day, but they KNOW this schedule. They’re busy, and an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old shouldn’t experience burnout. Sorry, not sorry. Homework is optional our our kids’ school, but we still make them do it to a degree. We don’t make them do any computer-based assignments though. They get enough screen time at school, and I’m still not sure why it’s done this way.

The predictability means that when they start to freak out about Monday homework, I can remind them they always have Homework Monday, Wednesday Friday and sometimes Saturday, but they always get every other day off.

Alex does the homework with our oldest. I get very impatient, and frustrated because I don’t know how to relay the knowledge in my brain to my child always… then he loses it, and I get frustrated and delegate it to Alex. Now Alex just does it with him. Problem solved. Save your mental health in any way you can.

The Bottom Line

Homework routines aren’t one-size-fits-all, and if yours isn’t working, it’s not because you’re failing — it’s because you haven’t found your kid’s specific flavor of chaos yet. Keep experimenting. And maybe hide the Legos until the homework is done.