Do I Just Need to Suck It Up? A Parent’s Honest Question About Homework Battles
The kitchen table at 5:30. Math sheet face down, pencil rolling at the edge, my friend Sheri’s daughter staring out the window like it’s a life raft. Sheri sat beside her, jaw tight, saying for the third time: “Just start. It’s five problems.” The girl picked at a hole in her eraser. Nothing happened.
Later, when the whole thing collapsed into tears—both sets—Sheri said to me: “Do I just need to suck it up? Is this just what it is, and I’m making it worse by caring so much?”
It wasn’t the first time she’d asked. I think most parents have had that exact thought in some version. It arrives at the point where every piece of advice you’ve absorbed—”pick your battles,” “connection before correction,” “make it fun”—feels like it was written for a different family. You’re standing in your kitchen, dinner is going to be late, the worksheet is still blank, and you’re wondering whether the problem is the task, the kid, or you.
I’ve been sitting with that question for a few weeks now, because I don’t think it’s rhetorical. It’s a real fork in the road. And the answer isn’t just about homework.
Sheri’s daughter Maya is nine. She’s clever, opinionated, perfectly happy to argue for ten more minutes of reading at bedtime, but the moment a worksheet appears, she turns off like a switch. At school her teacher says she’s fine—a little slow to start occasionally, but fine. At home it becomes a nightly battle where Sheri ends up doing half the problems just to get through.
The first instinct, the one behind the phrase “suck it up,” is the bootcamp version: this is a non-negotiable expectation, life is full of things you don’t want to do, and the sooner Maya learns to comply, the easier it will be. And there’s something real in that. There are absolutely days when a parent has to put the boundary down and say, “This needs to get done, and I will not fight with you about it.”
But the phrase itself bothers me. It borrows from a form of self-discipline that we also impose on kids too quickly. When a parent says “suck it up” to themselves, it usually means: I am going to tolerate discomfort and keep going. That’s a legitimate skill. But applying it to a nine-year-old whose body is saying I can’t rather than I won’t doesn’t teach persistence. It teaches her that her own signals aren’t important.
So we went a different route. Not a grand coddling strategy—just a few small shifts to answer the question directly.
First, she stopped the 5:30 start. Not as a reward, but as a diagnosis. For two weeks, instead of forcing the worksheet immediately after school, she gave Maya a snack and sent her onto the trampoline for twenty minutes. Sheri said it felt like giving up. But something shifted. The same worksheet, the same number of problems, but at 5:15 instead of 5:30, produced less weeping. Not zero weeping. Less.
Second, she asked a narrower question. Instead of “Why won’t you do your work?” she started noticing when the refusal happened. It turned out that Maya would happily do the first two problems and then hit a wall. Not laziness—a vocabulary gap in the third problem. The words were abstract enough that she genuinely didn’t know what to do, and she didn’t want to admit it. The meltdown was a confession. Once Sheri began saying “Which part is unclear?” instead of “Just get it done,” a lot of the anger drained out of the room.
The third shift is the one I think matters most. Sheri had to admit that the end of the evening was unbearable for her, and her “suck it up” voice wasn’t really about Maya at all. It was about her own exhaustion. When she said she “just needed to be tougher,” she actually meant she wanted the resistance to stop so she could finally make dinner and sit down. That’s honest, and it changes what needs to happen. The fix wasn’t more firmness toward Maya. It was a more realistic schedule that didn’t cram everything into the same half-hour. Worksheet time moved, dinner got simpler on those nights, and the expectation stopped being “feel motivated” and became “we do this together for twenty minutes, then stop.”
I see the same dynamic in classrooms. A student who seems defiant about writing often turns out to be one who can’t decode the prompt, or who has such messy handwriting in their own head that the output feels impossible. The same question gets asked: doesn’t this kid just need to try harder? Sometimes yes. But when I watch a student refuse a task and then easily complete a slightly different version of it, I know the task was the obstacle, not the attitude.
Does this mean we never say “suck it up”? No. I think the skill matters. But the way to tell if you’re in a suck-it-up situation or a change-the-situation situation is to ask: is this discomfort mine to tolerate, or is the task genuinely mismatched for this child right now? If Maya refused after school and after dinner and in the morning with a different activity—that’s a willingness problem, and it probably needs firmness. But if the same child can do the same work at a different time with different wording, the problem was the fit, not the character.
That’s hard to see in the moment. I know. The after-school hours have a way of flattening all nuance into one flat demand: make them do it. And sometimes you do need to hold the line.
But the question “Do I just need to suck it up?” deserves more than a yes or no. It deserves a pause. And then maybe a snack, twenty minutes on the trampoline, and a conversation about which part is unclear—instead of a battle at the kitchen table.
Sheri hasn’t solved it. There are still evenings when the tears come out, when she slides a pencil across the table and says “not yet, take a breath,” when she isn’t sure whether she’s being kind or enabling. But she has stopped asking whether she needs to be harder on Maya. She’s asking what is actually happening, and then adjusting what she can. That feels like a version of “sucking it up”—applied to the part you can change, not the part you can’t.
The worksheet is still there every night. The dog is still barking. And Sheri is still figuring out whether 5:15 is better than 5:30. But she’s asking the question differently now, and that seems to be the part that works.
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