How Much Total School and Cram School Time Do Kids Actually Get (And What It Means For Your Family)
It’s 8:42 on a Tuesday night, and I’m folding matching socks at the dining table while my 13-year-old Lila stares at a cram school algebra worksheet like it personally insulted her. A half-eaten honeycrisp apple is brown at the edges next to her pencil case, and she just huffed, “I can’t remember the last time I did nothing for an hour that wasn’t sleeping.” I paused mid-sock fold and realized I’d never actually added up how much time she spends on school, including cram, so I grabbed a napkin and started counting.
Regular middle school is 8 AM to 3:30 PM, that’s seven and a half hours a day, five days a week. Up until two months ago, Lila had cram three days a week right after school, from 4 to 7 PM, that’s another three hours each of those days. Add 15 minutes each way on the bus, that’s another half hour. Then homework: an hour from regular school, another hour and a half from cram, most nights. On Saturdays, she had four hours of cram for high school entrance exam prep, plus another two hours of homework after. By the time I added it all up, that was almost 68 hours a week of structured school and related work. That’s more hours than most full-time adult jobs require. I stared at the napkin and felt my throat get tight. I’d signed her up for cram two years earlier because all her friends were going, and the entrance exam is competitive, but I’d never stopped to add up what that actually meant for her days.
I’d noticed small changes before that. Her homeroom teacher emailed me once a month saying she’d dozed off during first period. She’d loved drawing in her sketchbook after dinner when she was younger, but for a year she’d said she was too tired to even pick it up. She started getting headaches every other weekend that would go away if she could nap for three straight hours. When I mentioned it to another mom at the playground, she shrugged and said that’s just what middle school is now, right? Everyone does cram. But when I asked her to add up her own son’s hours, she got quiet and said she hadn’t thought about it that way either.
I didn’t want to yank Lila out of cram entirely—we both know the entrance exam matters, and she wants to get into the public magnet high school with the well-regarded art program. So we made small, intentional changes instead. First, I set up a quick call with her cram school instructor. Lila was in the top advanced track, which was designed for kids gunning for the most competitive private high school. She didn’t need that level of intensity for the magnet, so we moved her down to the standard college prep track, which cut one full cram day a week. That freed up three hours of cram, another hour and a half of homework, and half an hour of commute every Wednesday. That was the biggest single change.
Then, I started picking her up from cram instead of having her take the bus. I used to spend that 30 minutes after work folding laundry or answering work emails, but I shifted those chores to after Lila goes to bed, and now we have 15 minutes alone in the car where we just talk about stupid viral videos or her art class, no homework talk allowed. It’s not a lot of time, but it keeps her from getting drained before she even walks in the door. Third, I asked the cram teacher about homework: Lila already gets plenty of algebra practice at regular school, so the teacher agreed to cut the repetitive problem sets she didn’t need, cutting another 20 minutes of homework most nights.
The thing no one tells you when you sign your kid up for cram is that it’s not just the time in the classroom. It’s the energy that gets drained that would otherwise go to regular school, or to the stuff that helps kids grow—hanging out with friends, drawing, playing outside, even just zoning out. Most of us add up the cram classroom hours and stop there, but when you add homework, commute, and the recovery time kids need from being structured all day, it’s easily an extra 15 to 20 hours a week on top of regular school.
If you’re a parent wondering if your kid’s load is too much, the first concrete step is just to sit down and add all the time up, like I did on that napkin. Don’t just estimate—write down every part: classroom time for regular school, classroom time for cram, commute time, homework time for both. You’ll probably be surprised. Second, check if the cram you’re paying for matches what your kid actually needs. A lot of kids get pushed into harder tracks than they need, just because parents think more is better. Ask the cram teacher what level your kid actually needs for their specific goals, and don’t be afraid to switch. Third, look for small cuts instead of forcing an all-or-nothing choice. You don’t have to pull your kid out of cram entirely to make a difference. Cutting one repetitive homework assignment a week, or switching to a shorter cram session on Saturday, can free up enough time to make a noticeable difference in their energy.
It’s been two months since we made the changes, and it’s not perfect. Two weeks ago, Lila still had to miss her best friend’s birthday skating party because of a mandatory cram mock exam on Saturday, and that ended with her crying in the car on the way home. We still have tough nights where she finishes homework at 8:30 and is too tired to do anything but go to bed. But now she has Wednesday afternoons completely free, and she usually walks to the park with her best friend after school, and she’s started keeping her sketchbook next to the couch again. Last week, she showed me a 10-page comic she drew about our dog, and she laughed so hard she snort-laughed when I told her it was silly and perfect. I still worry sometimes that we’re not doing enough, that we’re giving up an edge she needs for the future. But right now, this is the balance we’ve found. We’re still tweaking it, and that’s okay.
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