This is rife once secondary school hits and whilst it would be lovely to sit at the dinner table every evening to help little timmy with his homework.. this is the real world and when you have half a dozen kids, a full time job possibly with very unsociable hours, a house to keep, dinner to do, washing to wash, after school activities and christ knows what else, we could all be forgiven for wondering why WE are expected to teach our kids; this is a new concept BTW because our parents and grandparents only learned at school and managed fine
And yet more weird confusion that child doing research homework somehow means parents have to teach their child.
I'm starting to wonder how we all managed as kids with our extra curriculars and homework and not having parents fuming over everything.
I'm starting to think this is a culture shift too. When I had homework, it was MY job to organise my homework, MY job to do the research, MY job to make sure I had my bag packed, MY job to make sure I was organised. Learning was challenging and it was expected that even as top set kids we would find things challenging and would problem solve etc. If I wanted to do my extra curricular then it was expected that I was organised and made a plan, not that I'd do what I wanted and then home would write a note saying "Lola didn't do the homework she had a week to do because we were busy". If we were stuck on homework, it was MY responsibility to see my teachers and ask for help. It was also MY job to revise for exams and prepare for assessments and MY job to revise appropriately for GCSE exams and so on later etc.
Now there's an increasing number of people who think the job of schools to spoon feed, break everything down so it's all bite sized and easy, nothing should be too challenging (because that leaves the student feeling fragile and stupid because being clever means things are easy), it's the school's job to coach through every last thing in class leaving little room for independence. Parents are increasingly taking on responsibility for organising homework, working out when their child will do homework (complete with regular letters in if they don't like the time frame / reasons their child couldn't possibly manage X Y Z ). Schools are increasingly expected to put intervention in place, which is fine for those who genuinely have found something difficult but at least 50% of the time the lower marks are due to not bothering to revise when told to. Even at A Level, I've seen students not work on coursework independently and had parents sit down with their child and half write their child's coursework. There's an increasing culture in some families where actually learning and experiencing academic challenge is somehow a threat and something to be avoided, or more accurately the academic outcomes are wanted but they should be made as easy as possible.
My parents were really supportive of my education and I'd have been mortified if they'd contemplated calling the school because my teacher set some research homework.