Is It Common for Parents to Finish Their Kid’s Schoolwork For Them? What I Learned As A Mom And Teacher
It’s 8:19 PM on a Tuesday, and there are goldfish crumbs ground into the crack of our kitchen table. My 8-year-old Lila is slumped over a cardboard box covered in green construction paper, shoulders shaking. Her rainforest diorama is due first thing tomorrow, her soccer practice ran 15 minutes late, and her fine motor dyspraxia has left her hands cramping so bad she can barely hold a pair of child-safe scissors. She’d already re-molded her clay jaguar twice, cut three wrong sizes of vine, and written and rewritten her five-sentence paragraph about poison dart frogs. I’d been folding laundry on the other end of the table, watching her push through it for almost an hour. When she dropped her scissors and said, “I can’t. I just can’t,” I wiped the glue off my hands and picked them up.
I cut the last two vines. I re-glued the jaguar’s fallen leg where her shaky hands couldn’t get the glue to stick. I added the glitter river she’d been too tired to smooth out. By 8:40, the diorama was done, and I was tucking a half-asleep Lila into bed. When I came back to the kitchen, my best friend texted me a blurry photo of a half-painted 5th grade volcano. “Don’t roast me,” her message read. “Kid had a stomach bug all week, I just needed it to be done for the fair tomorrow.” That’s when the question popped into my head: I’ve been a part-time 2nd grade teacher for seven years, before Lila was born. I’ve stood in the school gym during project fairs, side-eyeing the perfectly 3D printed solar systems that definitely weren’t made by a 7-year-old. I’ve murmured to other teachers about how parents doing all the work robs kids of responsibility. And here I am, doing exactly what I once judged. Is this normal? Is this something every parent does sometimes?
I asked my local mom group chat a couple days later, casual, no judgment. “Raise your hand if you’ve ever finished a kid’s school project or homework for them when they hit a wall.” Out of 14 parents in the group, 12 replied with a hand emoji. One dad, whose son has dyslexia, said he types up his son’s book reports sometimes, because his son can dictate the whole thing perfectly but writing it out by hand takes him three hours and leaves him so frustrated he won’t turn it in at all. Another mom said she sewed her 10-year-old’s costume for the class play after her daughter pricked her finger 11 times trying to sew the hem, and the show was the next day. One mom said she’d never done it, but she got why people do. Only one said she never would, that it’s bad parenting.
So yeah, it’s way more common than we talk about. We all see the curated parenting posts online where kids do everything perfectly on their own, and parents never step in. But behind closed doors, most of us have bent the rule at some point. The problem isn’t that people do it sometimes, it’s that no one talks about what the healthy middle ground is, what’s okay and what crosses a line.
I’ve landed on three simple rules for myself that work for me, both as a parent and a teacher. First, I always be honest with the teacher. I scribble a quick note on the back of the project or at the top of the homework that says exactly what Lila did and what I did. For the diorama, I wrote: “Lila designed the whole layout, wrote her paragraph, cut 3 of 4 vines, and molded the jaguar. I finished the last cut and glued it down because her hands were cramping too much to keep going tonight.” Most teachers I know don’t care – they just want to know what the kid can actually do, so they can adjust assignments if needed. Cheating only happens when you pretend the kid did everything, not when you ask for a little help on a hard day.
Second, I only step in after the kid has put in the work. My rule is: they have to spend at least as much time working on the assignment as their grade level (so 3rd grade = 45 minutes of solid effort) before I’ll help finish. If they put it off all weekend playing video games and leave it to 8 PM on Sunday night, I make them finish it, even if it’s messy and late. They have to learn that procrastination has consequences. But if they tried, and they’re still stuck because of a bad day, a disability, or something out of their control, that’s when I step in.
Third, we talk about it the next day. It’s not just a “I’ll fix it and we never mention it” thing. After the diorama, over oatmeal the next morning, I said to Lila, “Your hands hurt really bad yesterday, huh? Next time we have a big project, let’s split the cutting into two nights, so you don’t do all of it at once when your hands get tired. Or we can email your teacher and ask for an extra day, okay?” It turns it into a problem solving lesson, instead of me just bailing her out.
Last month, Lila brought the diorama back home with an A on her paragraph, which was all her. No teacher called me out, no one got in trouble. I still get that little twinge of guilt sometimes, when I remember how I used to judge other parents for this. Is this common for every parent? No, of course not. Some parents never have to do this, and that works for them. But it’s a lot more common than we act like. Some weeks, you’re just trying to get everyone to bed on time, and help your kid who’s already tried harder than most people know get through one more hard thing. It’s not perfect. But it’s where we are right now, and it’s working for us.
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