Have you ever done your child's homework?

of course

SRM

My daughter’s 14. If she’s getting on my nerves with her repetitive teenage drama while I’m trying to help her then I’m like, “Fuck it!!! The answers are B, 7, 14x, Madagascar, and covalent bonds. Now leave and take your damn attitude with you. Christ!”

Beyond that I help her figure it out on her own. Unless it’s English.
“Yea… no. You’re on your own. Find a friend, kid.”

I (as a high school senior) don’t have any children (much less any children in school). However, my parents have helped me complete projects in the past when I had too much to do. They typically would help with very time consuming projects that were basically busy-work, i.e. making a collage or gluing things to a piece of poster board. I don’t think it’s that shocking or very significant. Everyone needs help at times and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only kid to have help on his homework. (Better to get real help from the parents than to get “help” from the friends)

I have helped with projects but never done the entire thing despite my son’s best efforts at persuasion.

I have done some of the mechanical stuff (hot gluing silk leaves to the Science Fair Project Board on plant growth) and have re-explained and highlighted important parts of the text. I have dug up illustrations off the Internet based on a detailed list compiled by the child in question and I have reminded them to run spell check. I have even made up and administered sample tests so the child and I both could see where more work was needed. I have gone to the craft store to get supplies and I have brain-stormed ideas on how to build items such as a Rube Goldberg marble tossing machine.

We have a mantra in our house, “What Would Grampa Do,” that dates back to my retelling one of his stories about being in college and having a truly horrible math teacher. Everyone in the class ended up failing the class except for my father. He got an A because after class every day he went to the library and went through book after book and math problem after math problem until he learned the subject. Whenever my daughter whines about her teacher not teaching or her textbook being too hard, I say WWGD? She heads off to the library or the Internet and teaches it to herself.

My son is a different story. In addition to being bipolar he is also ODD (Oppositional Defiant) which means the more the teacher says how important a project is, the less work he will put into it. I used to help him as I do my daughter, but now I let him take his lumps. He doesn’t want me to help him, he wants me to give him the answers and sometimes write them down for him. I won’t do that, so he ends up in detention doing the work without any help at all, especially since the school staff finally figured out how he was manipulating the other students, the paras and even some of the teachers into doing his work for him.

ODD? Seriously? How many more acronyms do I need to put on my list of personal issues?

Can’t believe they actually made that a “disorder”

ODD is a bullshit disorder. Look up the criteria for diagnosis, ten bucks says it can all be summed up with stubborn teenager. That’s a personality trait, not a disorder.

Here

I did the work.

Translation: Shitty Kid Attitude.

My kids are screwed. If they have a “disorder” and I think it can be fixed with a slap to the back of the head… problem solved.

Don’t need someone with a degree to help me out on that one.
Pills would be unnecessary as well.

What is a “no-cry” rule?

Personally, as someone who received help through the end of elementary school, I advocate not doing any work for children, but instead helping them budget their time. I didn’t learn how to do that for myself until the 3rd year of college, because when I was younger, if it got to be too much work at the end, someone would always step in and do it for me, or explain to my teachers that it was too much work and I would do it later. That doesn’t cut it in the real world, you learn from your experiences, and for me, I didn’t learn how to budget my time until after I had come up empty-handed a couple of times. The sooner they learn that the better for them.

I don’t have a child. Just an inner child and he never does his homework and I’ve given up asking him to do it.

I have never done the homework, but I do help when I can. I have done manual labor type stuff (cutting out papers for science projects and the like), explained things, and helped them figure things out. Sadly, they all passed my level of expertise in math by about 3rd grade! How depressing is that?

I’ve helped out when the stuff was busy work, and with editing. Never the entire project, like some parents did. Mostly I helped by making them start on work early enough (read, nagged them) and making sure they had access to everything they needed—posterboard, glue, books, math dictionary, tutors, etc. to be successful.

Fortunately, my kids have no issues or disorders that require any special help, other than being lazy sometimes. As a result, they tend to do their own homework without assistance. We have helped with manual things as mentioned above, and assisted with internet research. What I do for them often, is type. They have had 2 & 3 years of computer application class and they are accurate but slow. They spend very little time on the computer, so their lack of speed can lead to some late nights while typing reports. If they have written the entire paper and made self corrections, I’ll type it. My husband HATES that I do this… :(

In the future, i will help if i become a parent myself. Back in my school days, my parents help me. Occcasionally they will see what i have done and that’s when i start doing homework . I remember that once there is a question showing a figure of an animal and students are suppose to classified the animals according to their eating habit. And because i study in malay languange while my parents are studied in english, i spelled words like ” karnivor” as carnivorous (english). haha the teacher did commented on that i remmeber i guess she suspected something. LOL

My parents never did my homework for me. Theyve helped me if i was stuck, but always made me do the work myself. As much as i hate to say it, but there is kind of a point to homework. The kids who always had their parents doing theirs for them bombed 80% of the tests. Funny how that works out.

So why is it that parents do their childrens homework, they are only cheating their own child out of an education…..

I help with providing space, time, study tools, encouragement, reviewing, or quizzing before tests, occassional cut and paste chores, editting of written work.
Even that limited involvement takes a tremendous amount of time and energy when dealing with a fifth grade boy who would rather play.

My parents never did my projects for me, they helped me in certain ways like proofreading an essay or paper I would do, or even when I was much younger helping to measure something out. They didn’t even have to nag me about time management, I was always good with that. I remember with diorama’s and the posterboard presentations it was always my ideas that I wanted to do, sure I needed their help in getting the supplies but it was how I wanted to put it together. Maybe that is why I’m in a creative field now, it was never a problem for me then.

I remember distinctly we had a girl in elementary school her projects looked amazing and everyone even the teachers knew her mom did her projects. It used to piss me off so much. But even when the parents would do projects for kids it doesn’t mean they know squat about the subject they would still fail tests and quizzes.

When I was in high school and the huge term paper , the first with foot notes, and BEFORE the day of word processors and computers, I asked my mom to type it for me. She was a professional- a legal secretary.
As I got off the bus, I anticipated finding my paper done and ready to go.
Instead I opened the door to find my parents bags packed for an emergency trip out of state- one of my grandparents was dying of cancer.
So much for help with the typing.

@Sakata – Stubborn teenager is very far from true ODD. True ODD starts younger and lasts ones entire life. It’s the kind of thing that turns a stop for a broken tail light into a jail sentence for assaulting an officer. Many, many jail inmates are ODD.

To quote asmonet’s source, “Oppositional defiant disorder is a psychiatric category listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders where it is described as an ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures which goes beyond the bounds of normal childhood behavior.” It interferes with having friends, going to school (or “going to detention” as I often think of it), getting along with family, keeping jobs, and staying out of jail.

In my son’s case it appears to be the result of brain damage that occurred at birth and possibly the genetics of his birth parents. It is made worse by the fact that my husband/his dad is disabled, his sister is a star student whom everyone loves, and I am often at my wits’ end.

ODD means he not only wishes I would do his assignments but expects and demands that I do or else he will threaten me with physical harm. Thus, I do not do his work for him.

Some people use the label as an excuse, but unfortunately some people are hardwired for hostility.

I would like to thank you all for your answers to my question so far. It’s amazing to see this range of experience and advice. I really appreciate it!

I’m with Sakata.

@daloon – so, what’s a no-cry policy?

@La_chica_gomela If they start crying when doing homework, then they are under too much stress, and should stop. They don’t want kids to come to associate homework with feeling really bad. Parents with a lot of education don’t like to see their kids be less than competitive with the other kids, and sometimes, when we think our kids are not working hard enough, we come down on them hard enough to make them cry. The no cry rule gets us to pull back. We are not helping our kids when we make them cry. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that.

My son seems to sometimes be trying to get out of doing work. He is fairly clever about getting people, including his teachers, to do things for him. I remember being fairly stubborn about such things when I was a child, and so, I thought I knew all his tricks, because they were my tricks.

However, according to the assessment we had of him, he has difficulty planning. He doesn’t have a clue about how to budget time. He lives in the moment. It’s called executive functioning, and he just doesn’t have it as well as other boys his age do. He forgets things from moment to moment. It’s hard for him to stay focussed. Writing is difficult because you have to have an idea, keep the idea in your head, and figure out how to spell the words, and manipulate your writing implement. He can either come up with ideas and sentences, or write, but not both at the same time.

You can see how it might be easy to interpret this as being a slacker. For us, we can write without any thought at all. This is well demonstrated by some of the answers here, but I digress. I mean, without thinking about what we are doing. We just do it. It’s hard to imagine how this could be troublesome.

People like my son apparently think visually. They organize themselves visually. Unfortunately, we live in a world with an education system that, by and large, takes a flat, linear approach to teaching, and it’s hard for visual thinkers to get along in that system. We’re going to try a new piece of software that is designed for visual thinkers. I don’t know when we’ll have it. I hope it helps.

Huh, that rule seems like such a random metric of how much stress is too much. Some kids just cry a lot more than others.

I feel like if I associated starting to cry with getting out of doing my homework I would cry even more, and then I would have that whole association to deal with for the rest of my life, starting to cry whenever my life was getting stressful, and it would just be even harder to accept the fact that crying doesn’t solve anything, because unlike most people, for whom crying has never really solved anything, I would have the memory of when it did.

Sounds like a bad deal to me.

I got help from my parent mostly with really tricky math and chem. Other than that I’d just ask them to look my work over if I wasn’t sure about something.

My dad was evil when it came to math when I was little. When he was a kid with math homework he’d bring it to his grandfather to review and Great Grandpa would check it, give it back to my dad and say, “You’ve got two wrong.” But he wouldn’t tell him which ones so my dad had to redo all of them to find the mistakes. He did the same thing to us. It was really smart because it taught you not to be careless and double check as you went along.

@Darwin: blessings on you and your family. You have your hands full.

My daughter is homeschooled. I teach her the lesson, and she does the work until it is correct. She has a hard time with math. Yesterday she did the same problem 14 times until it was correct. She was very frustrated, but it all worked out in the end.

@Darwin: Whatever works for you & your child – work it! Every child is different, every situation is different. Wishing you much strength for what I know must be tough. <hugs>

@mzgator, that’s the way I learned math, too. Just do the work, and if it’s wrong, do it again.

@Darwin: You seem to be one of the few who have a truly difficult child. I was diagnosed with it as a child as were all the kids in my family and immediately resented the label and everything that came with it. I still believe it is not a real disorder on it’s own. And no one will convince me otherwise I suspect, though if I researched individual cases I would not close my mind to the idea. My own experience and that of those I knew who were also diagnosed was that it was a crock. I never had steady therapy, I was never given a prescription for it and while I had troubles, I don’t think any of the reasons were on that list. but rather those were symptoms of other reasons. I think most children have causes for behavior that when addressed ODD criteria just goes poof.

Nothing on any list I have seen for behaviors following diagnosis have ever applied to me. I’m happy, loved and nonviolent unless I feel the need to defend myself.

So, while I see from what you said that your child is suffering from behavioral difficulties, I personally don’t agree with the diagnosis. Almost all of the criteria in my opinion are symptoms of different problems, and the term ODD is a catch all. Even the name sounds ridiculous, Oppositional Defiance? Is there such a thing as Compliant Defiance? Oppositional Agreement? It wouldn’t be the first time a mental disorder came into existence and was replaced later on or abolished, I truly think this is one of those times.

“Many, many jail inmates are ODD.”
That’s a great example. One could make the argument that instead of a large percentage of inmates having the same disorder, a lot that the inmates and the jail system are like that because of poverty, class conflicts, poor education and poor parenting in addition to low resources in the community. Most people are taught the way to live. To me, that seems entirely more likely.

I apologize if I came off as combative in my first post, ODD is a slightly sore subject for me. I typed faster than I thought so I’m sorry for the harsh tone. Or if it seemed I was trivializing your experiences or that of your son.

Maybe I’m crazy, but ↑↑↑ looks to me an awful lot like oppositional defiance. ;-)

Careful daloon I wouldn’t be surprised if she hit you. Mind you I’m not trying to stop it, I just want to make sure I’m there to see it if it happens.

lol

If it looks like that will happen, you’ll be the first to know. However, we’ve already gone a few rounds, so I don’t know if she’ll have it in her to plaster me again.

My bet is on Asmonet!

@asmonet – I am sorry that you were mislabeled. It does happen and it happens fairly often, especially with the two biggies for misdiagnosis, ADHD/ADD and ODD. But nonetheless it is a real disorder that involves specific damage to the frontal lobe that impairs executive functioning in certain ways. The damage can be seen in a neurological work up, which my son has had.

My son’s problems started when he was very little and he is angry, violent and destructive even when he should be feeling loved and happy. His first response to everything is anger, even when we are doing something he has asked to do or giving him a longed-for present. When asked why he is so difficult to live with he simply says that it feels right to be angry or it feels good.

There is in fact medication that can help with real ODD and my son has been prescribed it. We can definitely see the difference with and without it. Being truly ODD is a very unpleasant existence and those who aren’t ODD cannot comprehend why someone would deliberately screw things up for themselves like that.

Yeah, Augustlan, but afterwards she gets all guilty, and her behavior is much nicer!

@daloon. Too true. :)

@augustlan: I got this. :)

@Darwin: Thank you for explaining things a bit further. I do appreciate it. Your son’s diagnosis seems to fit, and I’m glad that you know how to treat him and are working through it. My beef really is with diagnosis with no proof just those criteria. I think a disorder exists, yes. And it seems your son has it. My concern is that ODD as it is defined now is too vague and traps a lot of kids in its giant umbrella. I wish you the best of luck with your son, you clearly love him very much.

No kids should do their own home work

@antimatter Is that “No kids should do their own homework.” or “No. Kids should do their own homework.” ?

Ah. Ain’t punctuation grand?

@augustlan: <3

lmao… read my mind on that one

If your child needs help, help him/her. I have two teens and have helped them with their homework. Students are under tremendous pressure and it can be overwhelming. So, if my children were hard at work and needed me to do some internet research or possibly type a paper, I would help. If you needed help on your job, i am sure you would welcome assistance from a coworker.