Homework in Elementary School Is Not Normal (Even Though It’s Everywhere)
A seven-year-old crying over a worksheet at 7pm, after a seven-hour day, is not a normal part of childhood. It has become a normal part of childhood, which is a different thing, and the difference is the whole point.
I assigned homework for eleven years. I taught high school, and homework is simply what you do in high school, so I did it, and the entire time I felt that children who had just spent seven or eight hours in a building did not need more work when they got home. What we were actually doing, and I could see it even while I was doing it, was conditioning them to accept work outside their working hours, the way most adults have now quietly accepted it too. The school day was the job. Homework was the email you answer at 9pm. We were teaching them that early, and we were calling it responsibility.
Is homework bad for kids?
For elementary school children, the research does not support it, and that isn’t a fringe position; it’s the finding of the largest review of homework research anyone has done.
In 2006 Harris Cooper at Duke, with Jorgianne Robinson and Erika Patall, pulled together every study on homework and achievement published between 1987 and 2003. For students in grades seven through twelve they found a real, moderate relationship: kids who did homework did somewhat better. For students in kindergarten through sixth grade, the relationship between time spent on homework and achievement, in Cooper’s own summary of it, hovered around no relationship at all. Not a small benefit. None that they could find. His own explanation was that young children haven’t developed study habits yet, can’t screen out the distractions of a house, and that the struggling kids simply spend longer on the same assignment, which makes “more homework” look like “worse student” in the data even when it’s the other way around.
The guideline that came out of that work, the one the National PTA and the National Education Association both put their names to, is the ten-minute rule: about ten minutes per grade level per night, so ten minutes for a first grader, twenty for a second grader, and so on. Cooper himself has been clear that even that is a ceiling for elementary kids, not a target. Now compare it to what’s in your kid’s folder. A second grader with a reading log, a math sheet, spelling words and a “family project” is not doing twenty minutes. She’s doing an hour, and she’s doing it at the exact point in the day when she has the least of herself left.
So: is homework bad for kids? In elementary school, there’s no evidence it helps, real evidence of what it costs, and the people who set the guidelines say most schools are exceeding them. You can stop reading here if that’s what you came for. The rest is about why it keeps happening anyway, and what to do about it in your house.
What homework actually does to a seven-year-old
“No measurable benefit” makes it sound neutral. It isn’t.
A child in elementary school has been sitting, complying and performing for most of the day. Whatever restraint she has, she has spent it by three o’clock, which is why so many of them come apart in the car. Homework then takes the only hours she has left (the ones that were supposed to hold dinner, play, a bath, a book, and the unstructured time that the research on boredom and independent play says she needs more than any worksheet) and converts them into more school. Then it makes you the enforcer. The one adult who wasn’t school becomes school at the kitchen table, and the evening turns into a negotiation about a reading log, and the child learns a lesson that isn’t on the sheet: that reading is a thing you’re made to prove, and that home is a place where you get chased about it.
That last part is the one that took me longest to see. Homework in the early grades teaches very little content. What it teaches, reliably, is that learning is an obligation owed to someone else. And I spent eleven years teaching the teenagers who had learned it well, the ones who would not start a task until they’d asked what it was worth, who wanted to know if this was for a grade before they’d think about it. Those kids weren’t born that way. They were built, one worksheet at a time, starting around age six.
The hard part
You know this. That’s the uncomfortable part. You’ve watched your kid cry over a math sheet she could have done in four minutes at ten in the morning, and you’ve thought “this is insane,” and then you’ve made her finish it, because the teacher asked, and the school has a policy, and you don’t want your kid to be the one who didn’t. I’ve been on the other side of that folder. I know how it gets there.
Here’s where this lands, and it isn’t on you and it isn’t on your kid’s teacher either. Part of it is appearance: parents expect homework because homework looks like rigor, administrators expect it because “homework policy” is a line in the handbook, and a school with no homework looks like a school that isn’t trying. But the bigger part is uglier and I watched it from the inside. The way school currently functions, a lot of kids are not actually learning the material in the classroom. The class is too big, the pace is set by the pacing guide, and the teacher has to keep up with the curriculum whether or not the room is keeping up with her. So the practice gets sent home. Homework in that system isn’t enrichment; it’s the overflow from a day that didn’t have room for the learning in it, and the kid and the parent are absorbing the cost of a design problem at their own kitchen table. That is what a normalized thing looks like from the inside: everyone privately knows it, and everyone keeps doing it.
What you can actually do
Two things, and the first one is easier than it sounds.
Talk to the teacher, and talk to her as an ally, because she probably is one. Not “my child won’t be doing homework,” which puts her on the defensive, but something like: “We’re finding that homework is taking about an hour and it’s costing us dinner and sleep. I’ve read the ten-minute guideline. Can we agree that she’ll stop at twenty minutes and I’ll sign off on wherever she got to?” Most teachers say yes to that, and a lot of them say it with relief. If yours can’t, ask where the policy comes from and go one level up, politely, with the ten-minute rule in your hand.
And at home, tonight, decide that the hour after dinner is not school, whatever comes home in the folder, and hold it. A kid who gets one unstructured hour back is a kid who’s getting some of her day back, and that’s where you start.
If you do this and the answer from the school is no, and you notice that “no” bothers you more than it used to, that’s worth paying attention to. It’s usually not really about the homework.
One thing
Tonight, time the homework. Actually time it, start to finish, including the crying. Then compare it to ten minutes per grade level. That number is the whole conversation, and now you have it.
If you’ve been sitting at that table thinking “this can’t be right” and wondering whether it’s the homework or something bigger, You’re Not Imagining It is a free assessment I built for exactly that thought. I also write every week; you can find me on Instagram or join the list.
