“I Don’t Know What to Do Anymore”: What to Do When Your Child’s School Struggles Leave You Stuck
The eraser had worn a hole clean through the side of Milo’s multiplication worksheet at 7:12 on a Tuesday night, and I felt the thought rise up before I could catch it: I don’t know what to do anymore. Cheddar Goldfish crumbs were ground into the grain of the kitchen placemat, his hoodie string pulled all the way out one side, and six half-finished problems stared back at us after 45 minutes of work. He’d rubbed his eyes so many times his lids were pink, and when I pointed to 7 x 6 for the third time, he dropped his pencil and said he was stupid.
That was the third week in a row we’d ended the night this way. The week before, he’d hidden his reading log book under his mattress because he couldn’t get through two pages without mixing up b and d. His teacher had emailed twice to say he wouldn’t turn in work, that he spent class time doodling or poking the kid next to him instead of following along. I’d tried everything the parenting articles suggested. Sticker charts for completed work. No Nintendo Switch on nights we fought about homework. A high school tutor who came over twice a week for $20 an hour. I sat right next to him the whole time, prompted every step, praised every tiny correct answer. Nothing stuck. The week before the worksheet hole, I’d raised my voice after he spent 20 minutes staring at a single sentence, and he’d cried so hard he got the hiccups. We’d ended up on the couch eating blue popsicles over the sink, homework still crumpled on the table, and I’d thought the same thing then, too.
I almost ducked behind the Cheerio display when I saw his teacher, Ms. Henderson, in the grocery store three days later. I had a cart full of frozen pizza and milk, and I was bracing for another list of things Milo was doing wrong, another reminder that I needed to be doing more at home. She spotted me before I could turn, waved, and cut through the cereal aisle with a half-empty iced coffee in one hand, a lanyard covered in dinosaur keychains around her wrist. “I was just about to email you,” she said, before I could even apologize for the homework drama. “I’ve had that exact thought about Milo three times this week, honestly. I don’t know what to do anymore, either.”
I stared at her for a second. I’d spent months assuming I was the only one who couldn’t fix this, that every other parent and every other teacher had a system that worked, that we were the only ones stuck.
We leaned against our carts for 15 minutes while a stock kid restacked granola bars a few feet away, and she told me what she’s learned in 12 years of teaching third grade, and from raising her own 10-year-old son. Almost every time a parent says those words to her— I don’t know what to do anymore—they’ve spent weeks adding more things to fix the problem. More practice. More consequences. More tutoring, more reminders, more sticker charts, more conversations about trying harder. What almost no one does when a kid is this stuck is take things away. That day, she gave me three tiny, specific changes, no big behavior plans, no expensive testing required first.
The first one: stop doing homework right after school. I’d always pushed to get it done right after snack, so we could have the rest of the evening free. But Milo spends six hours a day sitting still, raising his hand, following directions, and forcing his brain to keep up with 24 other kids. By 3:30, he has nothing left. We switched to a hard rule: no talk of homework, no checking his take-home folder, for the first 90 minutes after he gets out of school. He rides his scooter up and down the block, builds Lego sets on the living room floor, or lays on the couch watching origami tutorials, no check-ins, no nagging.
The second change: shrink the work until it doesn’t feel like a fight. The district sends home 12 multiplication problems a night, but Ms. Henderson told me Milo only has to do three. He doesn’t have to sit at the kitchen table to do them, either. Most nights he yells the answers out while he jumps on the backyard trampoline, or scribbles them on a whiteboard propped on the bathroom counter while he waits for pasta to boil. When he does hit a wall, I don’t say “just try harder” anymore. I use the line she gave me: “This work is too big right now. What’s one tiny part you could do, and then we’re done for tonight.” More often than not, he picks one problem, gets it right, and asks to do two more before I can even get the popsicles out.
For reading, we threw out the rule that he had to read 20 minutes aloud to me every night. That exercise had turned every book into a test, and he’d started hating stories entirely. Now, I read most of the page out loud to him while he draws on the floor next to me. He reads one or two sentences a page, and if he mixes up a b and a d, I just point to the letter and say the sound, no long “sound it out” lectures, no making him repeat it five times. If he’s too tired after math, I read the whole chapter, and his drawing of what happened counts for his reading log. Listening to stories still builds vocabulary and comprehension, Ms. Henderson said, and it doesn’t make him feel like a failure every single night.
The third change was the one that felt scariest: I stopped owning his homework. Before, I checked his folder before we even left the school parking lot, reminded him three times a night to get it out, and packed his backpack for him in the morning so he wouldn’t forget anything. Now, the folder stays in his backpack until after that 90 minute break, and he’s the one who has to bring it out. If he forgets to finish work, or leaves the whole folder at school, he’s the one who talks to Ms. Henderson about it, not me. He forgot once, two weeks in, and had to stay in for five minutes of recess to finish the work. He hasn’t forgotten since. When it was my problem to nag him about, it never occurred to him to keep track of it himself.
We canceled the tutor after that, too. Instead of extra math worksheets twice a week, we play Yahtzee or Monopoly Junior on Saturdays, and he adds up the scores without even noticing he’s practicing facts. We bring home armfuls of graphic novels and audiobooks from the library every week, instead of forcing the leveled paper readers the school sends home. Last week he sat on the couch for an hour and read half a 220-page Dog Man book by himself, no prompting. A month ago, he wouldn’t touch a book with more than 10 words on a page.
It’s not like everything is fixed, of course. We’re still on the school’s waiting list for a dyslexia evaluation; the district has a three month backlog, and we won’t know until spring if he needs formal accommodations long term. Last Thursday, he crumpled a whole division worksheet before we even started, said he was never going to get it, and I felt that old familiar thought pop up again: I don’t know what to do anymore. We left the paper on the counter, walked to the gas station for slushies, and he did the whole thing in five minutes the next morning while he ate toast before school.
Some days he still comes home quiet, says the other kids finish their work faster than he does, that he’s stupid for mixing up letters. Some nights I still lie awake wondering if I’m letting him get away with too much, if shrinking the work means he’ll fall further behind, if I’m doing this whole thing wrong. What I haven’t done again is pile on more stuff when it gets hard. I used to think being stuck meant I had to find some big, perfect answer, some system that would make all the frustration go away forever. Now I mostly just try the next small thing. One less problem. 10 more minutes outside. One chapter read out loud, no corrections. Some weeks that’s enough, and some weeks it’s not. That’s where we are right now.
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