Anyone here is super involved with their dc school work/revision?

[guest103]

By super involved I mean, making sure they do their homework, actually sit down with them and make sure they are doing it right. Also revise everyday with them, making sure they are doing extra work and revising etc, organizing all their revision materials. Almost as if you are their teacher/tutor?
I do all of this, I guess the reason why I do it is to make sure dc achieves the best results possible and I know dc wouldn't do revision properly if I wasn't super involved. I do believe dc would still get great results but not as good as the results achieved with my help. At school dc picks up everything easily and participates and does very well, so perhaps I should just trust dc more and back off a bit? I just can't do it for some reason.
Wonder if anyone is/was in this situation?

I have a friend who does this. Her DS goes to a super selective and I wondered if he would have been able to without her help and if she changed jobs and was somehow unable to be there, could he cope?

Personally, I have always been a bit envious of these kind of parents, because I threaten "things will change around here" to my DC all the time. They laugh because things never change. My DC were able to get into their selective schools without help and had to learn to organise themselves. Over time, they improve. I did steer them in the right direction, by showing them how to get organised and so did the school, but that is that. As they are growing I'm quite confident that they can get along well with their work without me and their grades have improved too. So much so that I send them to boarding school later. lol.

Surely your role as a parent is primarily to raise your children to become independent. Genuine question but how is hovering and coordinating what DC does helping them? They may get good academics but if they are used to you organising everything for them and making sure everything is right, it will be a huge culture shock when they get to university/work and have to sort themselves out (and deal with the consequences of not doing stuff like revision)

I was with mine, but only because SEN meant they couldn't do it for themselves. Mine weren't looking at A levels.

I think if you have an able kid who is expected to do A levels you need to slowly withdraw and leave them to ask for help as needed. So by y11 at the latest (or pref y8/y9) they should be organising themselves mainly, but may need some support with revision, eg helping with a revision timetable or testing them.

By A levels they need to be self sufficient.

What year are they?

so perhaps I should just trust dc more and back off a bit?

No 'perhaps' about it.
A vital part of learning is 'learning how to learn'.
When they're little they need help organising themselves but at some point they have to learn to do it for themselves. By secondary age you need to gradually butt out. Make sure they've got the space and resources to do their homework. But while they're in ks3 let them start to work out for themselves how to manage their work, how to organise their study. You may need to prod and check a bit, but at some point it has to be their responsibility.

If you micromanage your DCs homework now, how do you think they'll manage when they get to uni, or the workplace?

How old is your child? Eventually your kid will have to become independent. So maybe start trying to get them to be more independent?

Do they have any intrinsic motivators? Do they want to do well or are they happy to coast? Do they know it may impact their choices later in life and are they ok with that? I say to my kids that working hard now makes it easier later - it’s not impossible to succeed if things don’t go as expected, but it just takes a bit longer and more effort.

It isn't the same as being uninterested though.
You can still ask how that test went.
You can still ask what methods they are using for revision and show them others.
You can still offer to test on revision if wanted.
You can still explain trig to them or discuss causes of the second world war.

As I said, I was very hands on with mine. But that was because it was the difference between passes and fails. I would rather have done less.

I agree it’s very age dependent as to whether this is a good thing,
If they are in secondary school, it is not good to be so involved. They need to do this by themselves and you only help is they ask for help.
Otherwise they will get to university and fall flat on their faces....

I'm interested and supportive, but I don't look at the content of the work unless DD asks me for specific help or is pleased with something (and wants to show me). She has to do that herself. I'll provide a conducive atmosphere and verbal support. I know she something struggles to settle to work, but finds it easier with me alongside, so I will do some admin or sewing for example while she works in the same room.
Some of her school work is too hard for me to understand anyway!

I work at a university and would say the kids that struggle most are those with the most involved parents. They've not learned how to do self directed study and really find it hard.

I know you're doing it for the right reasons, but your DC will fall flat on their faces at university and beyond if you keep doing this. They need the chance to learn these skills for themselves far more than they need the extra boost to their grades.

Yes, me!!! DS was failing badly. In his last set of exams he only passed one. So I made the decision to sit with him every day for one hour and study with him. He has exams at the moment so we are doing 2 hours revision per day. He has got one mark back so far and it was 90%. This would have been unthinkable even a few months ago.

We have an app that shows what needs to be done and I’ll remind her if there are issues she’s forgotten about what time she’ll have available, e.g. if she’s got clubs or a trip or something I’ll remind her she needs to plan ahead for the deadlines later in the week.
If it’s a revision task, she’ll sometimes ask me to help by quizzing her on stuff, but it’s down to her to ask.

Definitely agree that it’s very age dependent. We’re only a few months into Y7, so it’s a very different situation to children approaching exams.

@spondoolikay

I work at a university and would say the kids that struggle most are those with the most involved parents. They've not learned how to do self directed study and really find it hard.

Hmm, I went through secondary and university to PhD level and could have done with a bit more parental help tbh. (I went to university when I had just turned 17, so quite young really). My parents were extremely loving and supportive in general, just had no experience of study at higher levels so left me to it. Organisation was always a huge problem for me (still is in many ways tbh) and I know now I'd have achieved better results both in secondary and in third level if I'd have been better in that area. I'd spend ages studying some areas of the course, but would run out of time to get the course covered, so there were invariably questions I couldn't answer in exams. And the run-up to exams was so unbelieveably stressful.

So in my case a bit of direction wouldn't have gone amiss, or at least some guidance on how exactly to self-direct. I messed up at my first job because of organisational issues too, so it really has taken me years and years to 'self-learn' this stuff. And I'm not there yet.

My children are younger still, but I am determined to help them avoid the same pitfalls by showing them how to study, how to organise revision etc.
Hopefully the methods will become engrained in time.

I also chose courses and colleges I wouldn't choose again, again because of lack of experience. Parental input can be very helpful!

@DaisyDozyDee that sounds like a very useful app - can I ask which one is it?

Yes, I'm interested in the app too DaisyDozyDee!

Yes, we did that with our DS. In year 7, we did an awful lot of supervision/helping, etc., checking what homework he had and making sure he did it, helping him revise for tests, helping him draft essays, etc. Basically, he did nothing on his own and one of other of us would sit with him for an hour or two in the evening whilst he did what he had to do. We did that because he had very poor motivation and organising skills.

Thing is, though, we pulled away pretty swiftly once he was in the habit and we soon got to the stage in most subjects where he did the work himself, but just needed "prompting" (bullying!) from us to actually motivate himself to do it.

In years 8 and 9 we only "helped" with problem areas, i.e. he'd come to us if there was something specific he didn't understand. If it was a subject we knew about, we'd help directly, but if not, we'd help him research it (basically just telling him to either google it or look for you tube videos!).

For the GCSE years 10 and 11, he was fully self sufficient and our "involvement" was simply to remind him to do his homework/revision and not spend too much time of the xbox!

I don't think helping/supporting children is a problem at all. The real problem is not letting go. I expect most, if not all, kids need a kick up the bum and some help when it comes to homework and revision. The key is to step back once you've given them "the tools" to do it themselves, by "tools", I mean the basics (i.e. good literacy and numeracy), motivation to actually do the homework (kick up the bum when necessary), and to know where to look for help/support if they start to struggle.

@spondoolikay

I work at a university and would say the kids that struggle most are those with the most involved parents. They've not learned how to do self directed study and really find it hard.

It's not so much "most involved parents" who've been in it for the long term, more a matter of the "last minute" parents who do loads of tuition or pay for private tutors as the exams loom, i.e. short term coaching.

There's no point in virtually ignoring your children's education in the earlier years and then panicking at poor end of year exams or mocks, and then intensively "helping" them at the last minute to scrape better grades.

1st year here and I prod in terms of having the correct books , ask questions in terms of activities, practicals etc so she has everything she needs.

I also spot check - as in once every week or so - homework but only to ask if it’s actually done.

What I don’t do is check the actual homework. I’ll see if she is falling flat on her face when results come in and there will be consequences if she doesn’t put the work in.

I think it’s infantilising to sit with a 13+ year old and do homework and study with them

I was left to do it myself as a bright teen, and it worked fine. I didn't do huge amounts, but I didn't need to. I've done a lot of study as an adult, and as I said to one tutor, I'm a procrastinator, and I do tend to skimp on the study, but I've got a very good idea of what I can get away with! That's actually a useful skill in itself, and too much spoon-feeding may prevent it being learnt.

An even brighter friend was ill just before school exams one year. Some of us were very concerned, because she a normally did huge amounts of revision, and she didn't get the chance. As it turned out, she still did really well, and actually, she relaxed a bit after that (but still went on to get the top results in our year).

DD refuses almost all offers of help, but she does tell us over dinner what she's done at school - that revisiting is quite useful, I think.

@merrygoround51

1st year here and I prod in terms of having the correct books , ask questions in terms of activities, practicals etc so she has everything she needs.

I also spot check - as in once every week or so - homework but only to ask if it’s actually done.

What I don’t do is check the actual homework. I’ll see if she is falling flat on her face when results come in and there will be consequences if she doesn’t put the work in.

I think it’s infantilising to sit with a 13+ year old and do homework and study with them

It's not "infantilising" if it's necessary to stop your child struggling and ultimately failing, and especially if the child is receptive to parents doing it.

My philosophy with education (both my own and my child's) has been simply to avoid getting behind. When you start to get behind with anything in life (whether your school work, house work, office work, or whatever), you have to work twice as hard to get back to where you should be. Far better just to put a little effort in to stop getting behind in the first place.

My DS certainly isn't "infantilised" as he's now 20, in his 2nd year of a very hard degree course at a top 10 University. For the past 5 years, he's achieved mostly grade 9s at GCSE and 4 grade A* a A level, all on his own merit as we've not "helped" him since year 9! Neither of us could have helped with his A level Physics if we'd tried! In his first year at Uni, he achieved a score of over 80% across all his modules including coursework and end of year exams, with absolutely zilch help from us as he was living away at Uni and we had no input whatsoever!

As I've said above, in my opinion, what is key is to pull away over time and transition them into doing it themselves. In our case, it was always our intention to have pulled away fully by the start of the GCSE years to leave him on his own for GCSE and A levels, having given him "the tools" to be capable of doing it himself, which he did.

It's the job of parents to "parent" and if that means being over-invested in school work if it leads to better outcomes, i.e. better qualifications lead to better job prospects which generally lead to better incomes and better of quality of life. That can't be a bad thing as surely all parents want the best for their children.

Personally, I find the parents who help their children write essays for their Uni course a hell of a lot worse than parents who help with their children's secondary school homework!

I remember my parents helping me when they could when I was at high school - mostly helping motivate me to actually revise as opposed to the specifics of each subject (except German as my mum taught German for a while so she was able to help me with that). If I didn't know something or needed help with something, I would ask them, but, most of the time, I looked it up myself or asked the teacher for myself.
As others have said, how are they going to be independent if they're constantly being supervised along the way? When they're at uni, there's no such thing as 'parents evenings' and the only people held accountable for their work are the students themselves. I'd learned by that point to motivate myself to get all my coursework done. The only people who helped me were my tutors at uni and fellow students.

@WishICouldButIDontWantTo As others have said, how are they going to be independent if they're constantly being supervised along the way?

The key is pulling away and transitioning over time to reduce parental input once the child has acquired the good habits of doing their homework, having learned to research for themselves, and having learned organisational skills. The best way for them to learn those skills is to have a bit of parental support behind them, and then once they're self sufficient, parents pull away and leave them to it.

I really can't believe there will be many parents who check their children's homework every single school day for their 7 years of secondary/further education!

We helped DS2 a lot throughout secondary, but that was because he has SEN and was simply overwhelmed by the prospect of a mountain of revision and homework. We never actually DID his homework, but would help him plan and structure things and often worked in the same room as this helped keep him on track somehow. I consciously tried to 'withdraw' as he got older, or asked him how he thought he should approach something, or make his own timetable etc.
It was also fortunate that between us DH & I were interested in his A level subjects, so we could actively engage in the topics and try to make them more interesting.

He's now at uni and mostly coping OK, although I still get the occasional message asking for help with odd things.