Homework has been a struggle in our house for years.
Every school year, I seem to start with the same hope: maybe this year will be different.
Maybe she’ll have more stamina. Maybe we’ll find a routine that works. Maybe the homework will be manageable.
And every year, at some point, I find myself asking the same question:
When does pushing through homework stop being helpful?
The Reality of Our Afternoons
My daughter has ADHD and dyslexia. By the time I pick her up from school, she has already spent hours focusing, regulating herself, reading, writing, transitioning between activities and doing things that require a lot of effort for her.
By pickup time, she’s spent.
And the last thing she wants to do when she gets home is more schoolwork.
Honestly, I don’t blame her.
Her after-school schedule is busy, too. She has dyslexia tutoring twice a week, occupational therapy once a week and behavioral therapy once a week. Then there’s her one fun activity, which is currently sewing.
She still needs time to play with friends, play with her toys, be outside and simply do nothing.
Then we add homework.
Homework Isn’t Always as Simple as It Looks
On paper, the homework doesn’t necessarily sound overwhelming.
A math worksheet. Twenty minutes of reading. A fluency passage. A writing assignment. An occasional project.
But I’ve learned that the amount of work on the page doesn’t always tell me how difficult the assignment is going to be.
Math is a good example.
Sometimes I have to figure out how to do the problems myself before I can help her. I can usually work backward and find the answer. I can Google how to solve it.
But that leaves me wondering whether I’m even teaching it the same way she’s learning it at school.
At that point, I’m not just supervising homework. I’m trying to teach a lesson I wasn’t there for to a child who is already exhausted.
And sometimes even that doesn’t work.
Recently, she brought home an assignment for a narrative she was writing. She had a plot chart and needed to work on the setting, characters and problem.
I love writing, so I thought this was one assignment we could handle.
We looked at the directions. I even searched for more information about completing a plot chart. We brainstormed ideas together, she made her choices and she completed the assignment.
I sent her to school the next morning feeling pretty good about it.
She came home and told me we’d done it wrong.
She had to redo it at school.
That experience summed up so much of my frustration with homework.
If there’s a specific way an assignment needs to be completed, but my child doesn’t understand what is expected and I don’t have enough information to help her correctly, what are we accomplishing by struggling through it together at home?
The hardest part wasn’t that we misunderstood the assignment. That happens. It was watching her work on something at home, feel like she had successfully completed it, and then find out the next day that she’d done it wrong.
That’s defeating. For her and for me.
I don’t want homework to repeatedly become an opportunity for her to practice something incorrectly—or to leave her feeling like she failed at something she genuinely tried to do.
I Used to Think We Just Needed a Better Homework Routine
This is where I’ve struggled for years.
I don’t want to send incomplete homework back to school.
I was the kid who did my homework. The idea of simply deciding we’re not doing something makes me uncomfortable.
So every year, I try to make it work.
We’ll start earlier.
We’ll get ahead over the weekend.
We’ll do a little at a time.
We’ll make a schedule.
And sometimes those things help.
But they don’t change the fact that there are evenings when my daughter has nothing left to give.
Meanwhile, the things homework replaces are often the exact things she needs after school: playing outside, seeing friends, using her imagination or simply having some downtime.
That’s when I started wondering whether the problem wasn’t our homework routine at all.
Maybe I was asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking, “How do I make her finish this?”
I needed to start asking:
“What is she actually getting from doing this right now?”
When Does Homework Stop Being Helpful?
I don’t think the answer is simply to stop doing homework. But I also don’t think the answer is to push through every assignment no matter what it costs.
I also don’t want her learning that having ADHD, dyslexia or an IEP means she simply gets a pass when something is hard. She still needs to learn the material and complete work that’s appropriate for her.
But I’m starting to question whether home is always the right place for that to happen.
If she doesn’t understand an assignment, I’d rather she have time to work on it at school, where someone who knows what was taught—and how it was taught—can help her learn it correctly, than spend an hour at home with me guessing.
I struggle with consequences around incomplete homework for the same reason. If she understands an assignment and simply chooses not to do it, that’s one situation. If she couldn’t complete it because she didn’t understand the directions, needed more support or had reached the end of what she could manage that day, that feels different to me.
I don’t want her protected from every consequence. But I also don’t want her losing a privilege or reward for something she genuinely wasn’t able to complete successfully without help.
I’m still figuring out where that line is.
But I’ve started paying attention to different things.
Does she understand what she’s supposed to do?
Is she practicing something she learned at school, or am I trying to teach the material at home?
Is a reasonable assignment taking an unreasonable amount of time?
Are we still learning anything, or have we reached the point of tears and frustration?
Is this a one-night problem, or is the same thing happening over and over again?
And maybe most importantly:
Is this still a homework problem—or is it something I need to bring back to the school?
Because if we’re repeatedly spending our evenings struggling through work she doesn’t understand, I don’t think the solution can always be for us to try harder at home.
Sometimes the teacher needs to know what homework actually looks like from our side of the kitchen table.
Sometimes we need to talk about workload.
Sometimes we need to ask questions about accommodations and her IEP.
And sometimes I need to be willing to say, “This is where we stopped tonight.”
I’m Still Learning Where to Draw the Line
This is the part I wish I could wrap up with a perfect answer.
I can’t.
I want my daughter to learn. I want her to practice skills she needs. I don’t want to automatically remove something just because it’s difficult.
But I’ve watched her put enormous effort into things that come easily to other kids. I’ve also watched her come home completely drained and then be asked to sit down and do more.
I’m trying to remind myself that the goal isn’t a completed worksheet. The goal is for her to learn. Sometimes those are the same thing. Sometimes they aren’t.
So I’m becoming less interested in whether every box on every worksheet is filled in and more interested in whether the work is actually helping her learn.
And when it isn’t, I think that’s worth a conversation.
Not another battle.
If homework has become a constant struggle in your house, I’d love to hear how you’ve handled it. When do you push through, and when do you decide you’ve done enough for the night?
If you’re also navigating ADHD, dyslexia, school struggles, IEPs and all the other messy parts of parenting, you’re welcome to follow along. I share what we’re learning as we go—not because I have all the answers, but because sometimes it helps to know another parent is figuring it out too.
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