Why doesn’t my child want to do homework? 4 important reasons

Many parents dislike homework and 5th grade language arts even more than their children do. If schoolchildren do not solve examples or do exercises at home by themselves, moms and dads often have to get involved and supervise the process. This is nerve-racking and tiring for both parties. What to do if your schoolchild does not want or cannot do “homework”?

Why do homework at all?
Is it necessary to do homework? There is no unequivocal opinion on this issue among students, parents, or even teachers. Some teachers complain that checking homework takes too much instructional time that could be spent on presenting new material. Those who argue with them who believe (and I note – rightly so) that it is necessary to repeat the material repeatedly, and most importantly – to make sense of it in order to consolidate it. Homework including 3rd grade science textbook is the hours included in the curriculum for independent study. Such work is necessary for the best understanding of the information. In addition, homework helps to develop skills such as self-organization, time management, and finding the information you need. This is invaluable for future vocational training and later life in general.

Children who faithfully do their homework and consider it necessary, admit that it gives them an opportunity to go deeper into the subject, to work through it better, to discover what remains unclear. At the same time it is worth noting that doing homework helps the successful learning process only to a certain point. After all, if a pupil spends several hours every day solving examples and copying exercises, it significantly worsens the quality of his life: the child does not get enough sleep, is overworked and feels broken.

Why a child refuses to do homework

Two cute little sisters writing a letter together at home. Older sister helping youngster with her homework. Education for kids.

Often parents think that children neglect homework simply because they are lazy or don’t care about their studies. In fact, there can be a huge variety of reasons, and each case should have its own recommendations.

Misunderstood assignment
A child may simply not figure out how to do the assignment. If this happens sporadically, you need to help him or offer to ask for help from classmates.

If it is a recurring problem, it needs to be solved systematically. Analyze the progress of the child, talk to the homeroom teacher, identify the reasons: they can be hidden in skipping lessons or too difficult for your child’s program.

Poor health
If a child is chronically fatigued, making it difficult to learn, it may be due to health problems, particularly with the cervical spine. Does he have normal posture? Is he sitting at his desk correctly? Identify the cause of the problems, perhaps with a doctor.

Personal Problems
Perhaps your high schooler is experiencing his first crush, which is not at all conducive to concentrating on his textbooks. Perhaps, by neglecting his lessons, he is protesting against your hyper-peddling. In any case, you should definitely talk to him. It may be useful to visit a psychologist, and for you, not for the child.

Lack of free time
Do not exclude this option. If your child attends art school and a sports club, and has to do chores around the house, they may not have time for serious, thoughtful textbook work. Use time management: Draw a circle and draw a picture of your child’s daily routine. It’s quite possible that his schedule just doesn’t include time to do his homework conscientiously, not in a hurry, and still have a couple of hours for walks and other leisure activities. Think about how to build the daily routine differently, how to reduce the workload.

How to motivate your child to take learning more seriously
A person of any age will try to avoid work, the meaning of which he does not understand. Explain to your child why what he or she is given to do at home is important for his or her future: “The more you write in the pen, the neater your handwriting,” “To learn the rules about stressed and unstressed vowels better, you need to do a lot of exercises,” and so on. Children like when they are praised, when parents are pleased with them. It is not unreasonable to tell them how happy you will be if they do well in school. And to do well in school, you need to study seriously, including at home.

It is important that your children understand what discipline is. Explain to them that doing their homework is an important and necessary part of learning. You can give an analogy to work: an adult, their parent, doesn’t do all the work and always do it with joy either, but there are some things that need to be done.

It is a mistake to try to bribe a child: motivation in the form of promising benefits for doing homework does not work well. Instead, you can do what in psychology is called an external agreement. You and your child sign a paper together: you decide when and where homework will be done (for example, at 7:30 pm at the kitchen table). Everyone who signs the agreement automatically becomes obliged to follow its rules.

It is imperative that the child do the assignment himself. You can help him with a difficult task, give him a direction of thought, tell him if there is a mistake in a Russian exercise, and offer to find it yourself. But in no case sit down next to him or her and don’t try to manage the process, or even take it upon yourself. This is fraught with the fact that in the future, refusing to do their homework, the child may shift some of the responsibility for it to you.

You can make sure that the learning process was not for the child a painful chore which he wants to escape from. Help him to understand the reasons for his problems, so he can solve them on his own.