Can We Please Just Cancel Homework For Young Children

For the majority of us, we spend 13 years in school, from the ages of 5-18 (or thereabouts).

We spend 9-3pm in a classroom learning, with roughly an hour worth of breaks. That’s 5 hours a day, 5 days a week – FOR CHILDREN / TEENAGERS. Kids who are still growing and learning.

I can tell you that at the moment, my 5 and 7 year old DO NOT have homework (other than reading a book) and I am grateful. They are SO tired after the school day that they need to switch off and chill out.

Even if they were full of energy, it’s so beneficial to them to be kids at home.

So I fully support an environment where schooling happens at school, and that’s it. I do not personally see any advantage of doing homework at home for a young child.

Is Homework there to prove to teachers that the students paid attention during the day? Is it to help a child’s memory?

I really don’t understand the point of it, especially for a young child.

My kids come home and barely remember what they have for lunch hahaha

I spent a good chunk of my school holidays, when I was a teenager, working on essays and projects and unable to actually enjoy my break and chill out.

Surely that kind of thing is counterproductive right?

Well actually yes … it has been proven over and over again that homework does not have a substantial impact on early learning. Children need time, unstructured time. They do not get enough of it.

They also need time to rest.

For an older child, however, homework helps improves students’ understanding of what was learned in class during the day. They say that homework allows students to do work on their own without in-class guidance and figure things out by themselves. This helps them learn better.

And dammit, from me – that makes sense.

So as much as I would like to say “cancel homework for everyone“, I can see there being some kind of benefit to it when a child is older.

I’d also like to cancel homework during the school holidays for teenagers, but again I understand the benefit of trying to keep the topics learned in the student’s mind.

It’s just that it sucks having to spend your school holidays researching for a project or writing an essay … which we all know will be left till the last minute because holidays are more important than homework ahaha