is homework at age 6 to blame for high levels of parental involvement in homework throughout school?

[thewomanwhothoughtshewasahat]

me and dh were just thinking - if you give a 6 year old homework it is not something they can be responsible for. Rather, it becomes something for which parents must take responsibility. When we were at school, we didn't get homework until we were 11. At that age we were expected to take full responsibility for it. Our parents never even knew what it was. Their involvement comprised no more than the occasional "have you done your homework?" This was the case throughout secondary school. Now that 6 year olds have homework, parental involvement becomes obligatory - children learn that homework is something they do with their parents, not something they do independently. Parents are left having to wean children off parental involvement or - as seems to be the case - letting it continue. And children simply don't get the opportunity to work in a truly independent way and truly take responsibility for their work. what do you think?

notagranny . I can remembe rmaking myself ill over a maths test once. It isn't going to happen to our kids. I am quite happy to be labelled a bad parent (have just written to dd's teacher to say she won't be doing her reading as she thinks the book is boring).

My DS says he'll lose golden time if he doesn't do his homework. Which as he is 7 and therefore imo unable to take real responsibility for his homework, I consider is him being punished for my behaviour.

I'm really really pissed off about it. But I'm constantly told that the only alternative is to home educate. Which, since most parents and most educational theory agrees with me, not the people who set homework at age 7, really pisses me off even more.

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But we don't live with it, do we Cod, our children do, and all the information we've got about it, is that it's bollocks.

I don't want to live with something that I know is disadvantaging children. Any more than I want to live with shit school dinners.

FluffyCharlotteCorday raises an interesting point.

Do we know what the net effect of more homework is ?

Has anyone actually seen any numbers ? I can't find any.
FluffyCharlotteCorday asserts that it's bollocks, perhaps she has found the data that I couldn't ?

Very difficult to get numbers on this, but the consensus atm appears to be that at secondary level, homework is a Good Thing while at primary the results are inconclusive and contradictory.

I've also read somewhere (can't remember where) that pupils who do loads of homework and pupils who do hardly any, both have lower attainment than those who do a "moderate" amount (whatever that is). But that applies only to secondary. I think there's just been very little research on primary compared to secondary, probably because primary school children have only relatively recently started to do homework, so there has been nothing to research. Might try and google later if I have time and can be arsed.

dd is 6 and just started school in England. She comes home each day with a book to read that she then writes a little comment on - no problem there as I'm aware she needs to catch up. However today she also had a list of 9 words to spell and she had to write "My name is xxxxxx" several times on a sheet of lined paper.

I got her to do the writing. I read the spelling words out for her to spell whilst playing a game and I wrote on her book pad that she was too tired to read the book.

It is too much. She doesn't finish school until 3.40, she gets in, has a play and we eat at around 5.30pm. I find it hard looking after her and her younger brother, and cooking the tea, to concentrate much on doing homework with her. I do try but it's important that she winds down after school I think.