Don’t Do Your Child’s Homework

Children will often struggle with some subject in school. They may excel in some areas, while being basically unable to stay on top of things in another. This is true for most children, and it can be both frustrating and discouraging as a parent to watch your child struggle in these situations. You want your child to succeed.

As a parent, much of the burden is on you to help your child learn and get back up to speed in the areas that they’re falling behind. As your child moves through grades, they’ll continue to need to work harder in order to get back up to speed. The further that they fall behind, the more that they’ll have to make up as they grow older. Ideally, you address the problem sooner rather than later.

At some point, you may find yourself extremely frustrated with your child’s inability to learn and understand the concepts. You’ll likely be spending a lot of time (or money if you hire a tutor) on trying to help them to get back up to speed. You’ll need a lot of patience to spend time working with your child on getting back up to speed.

You may be tempted to simply do the homework for your child or to give them the answers. Outside of the very obvious reason why you shouldn’t do this (because it’s cheating) there are much bigger reasons beyond that not to do it as well. Do not do your child’s homework for them. It’s a short term solution that will have long term negative impacts on your child and you.

First off, your child will come to believe that it’s actually fine to do this - not do their own work but let someone else do it for them. They’ll believe that you will bail them out next time, and the time after. It’s much better to let your child fail in this situation than to do their work for them - there are other ways you can support them longer term if you need to.

Your child will also likely lose motivation to work on becoming better and trying to solve their own problems. Instead, they know that Mom or Dad will bail them out whenever things get too tough. Instead of learning how to take on the toughest challenges and working through them the best that they can, they’ll simply believe it’s easier to give up.

Furthermore, they’ll not learn the material that they need for further progress. Instead of putting them ahead, you’re actually putting them further behind. They’re not any closer to knowing the material that they need to, it simply looks like they know it. This will almost certainly come back to hurt them down the road. Help your kids work on learning the actual material the best they can rather than putting them further back.

Teach your kids to work hard, and that if they have to fail at a subject, then they have to fail. Bailing them out by doing work for them will not help them in any way that is worth it in the long term.