When Homework Makes a Child Sick: How One Family in China Reset the Routine
The dining-table light was already on when I walked in, and the eraser had already been torn into small, damp-looking curls. Mia, a quiet fourth-grader I tutored in Chengdu, sat with her math workbook open but her body angled away from it. Her mother met me at the door with the phone in her hand and the particular tight voice Chinese parents use when they are trying not to shout in front of a guest.
“Please help this kid,” she said. “Last night she was up until eleven. She says her stomach hurts before she even opens her bag.”
Mia did not look up. She was rubbing a pencil eraser against the same corner of paper until a gray hole appeared. On the page, several problems had been erased so many times that the paper felt thin. Her notebook was full of red circles, teacher comments, and parent signatures. Nothing about it looked like laziness. It looked like fear.
I sat down, put my bag on the floor, and asked her mother to give us ten minutes. Then I poured Mia a cup of warm water from the thermos and said, “We’re not finishing the whole page tonight. We’re only looking at problem one.”
She stared at me. “But Teacher Li will check.”
“I know,” I said. “First we make the page smaller.”
I folded the worksheet so only one problem showed. That sounds almost too simple, but it mattered. Mia was not refusing because she could not do the math. When I asked her to explain the problem out loud, she could tell me the steps clearly. She even used her fingers to show the fractions. The problem came when she had to produce the “correct” version in writing. After every digit, she glanced at my face. After every line, she reached for the eraser.
What her mother saw as stubbornness was closer to a freeze response. Mia had learned that homework meant correction, comparison, and more work if the result was not neat enough. Her stomachaches, her eraser shredding, her repeated requests for water and toilet paper—those were not delays designed to annoy anyone. They were the only ways her body could release pressure.
That night, I took a blank sheet from the printer and told her to write the answer on scrap paper first.
“No eraser,” I said. “If it’s wrong, draw one line through it and keep going. This is the ugly draft.”
She wrote a number, stopped, and looked at the eraser.
“You can put it in the pencil case,” I said. “I’ll hold the case.”
She handed it over like it was a small medical device. The answer was wrong, but she had written it without destroying the page. We checked it together, found the mistake, and wrote the next version in the workbook. She did four problems in twenty minutes. It was not a magical transformation. She sighed. She asked how much time was left. But she did not say her stomach hurt once.
Before I left, I asked her mother not to add extra copying that night. This was not an easy request. In Mia’s class of nearly fifty students, homework was checked daily, scores were discussed openly, and the parent group chat often filled with photographs of perfect exercise books. Her mother was worried that backing down would make Mia fall behind. I understood that. But a child who cannot start is not going to catch up through more pages.
We agreed to try a smaller routine for two weeks.
First, we reduced the visible workload. A folded worksheet, a blank card covering the next five questions, or a sticky note showing only “1–3” made the task feel possible. Instead of saying “finish your homework,” her mother began saying, “Which one looks easiest to start with?” If Mia could not choose, her mother would point to the first problem and say, “Just read it to me.”
Second, we separated thinking from presentation. Math reasoning went onto scrap paper, where mistakes were allowed to stay visible. The workbook came later, only for the answer she wanted to submit. I also asked her mother to stop correcting every digit during the first attempt. Every interruption taught Mia to wait for an adult’s judgment before trusting her own hand.
Third, we used a visible timer and a real stopping point. Mia worked for twenty-five minutes, then took a five-minute break to walk to the kitchen, water the plants, or stand on the balcony. When the timer rang, she put her pencil in the cup herself. Small children and older children alike calm down when they can see the exit.
Fourth, her mother sent the teacher a short, respectful message: “Mia has been very tense and sleeping late. For two weeks, may she do half of the repeated correction problems while we rebuild her homework habit? I will sign the book every day.” The teacher agreed. Many teachers will negotiate when the request is specific, temporary, and does not ask them to ignore learning forever.
The most difficult change was not the worksheet. It was the time after school. Mia’s mother had been using every quiet minute for extra practice—another oral calculation page, another English recording, another composition to “make up” for a low score. We left forty-five minutes before dinner completely empty. Mia drew in a sketchbook, cut paper, or lay on the sofa doing nothing. Her mother struggled with this. She kept standing near the desk with a workbook in her hand.
“Isn’t this wasting time?” she asked me once while Mia was in the bathroom.
“Right now,” I said, “the time is part of the work.”
After three weeks, Mia still did not love homework. On Monday mornings she sometimes complained of stomach pain. After a unit test, she came home crying because she had scored eighty-two and her mother had immediately mentioned buying another practice book. We did not buy it. I asked her mother to wait until Mia could start homework without tears for four consecutive weeks before adding anything.
Last week, Mia opened her Chinese composition book and said, “Can I do the ugly draft first?” Her mother looked at me and closed her mouth. Later she sent me a message: “She wrote two paragraphs without asking me if every sentence was okay.”
That is where things stand now. The bedtime is earlier, the eraser is no longer being destroyed, and the stomachaches have not disappeared completely. Her mother still checks the class ranking at night and still asks whether eighty-two is good enough. I do not have a perfect answer for that. I only know that a child cannot think clearly when the main thing she feels at the desk is danger. The page has to become smaller before the work can become bigger.
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