Why This 10-Year-Old in China Refused to Do Homework: Practical Tips for Caregivers Dealing With School Burnout
The smell of osmanthus from the apartment compound’s old trees clung to my sweater when Xiaoyu’s mom pulled the door open that Tuesday evening in October. Her face was tight, and she nodded toward the dining table without saying hello. Ten-year-old Xiaoyu was slouched on a plastic stool, his fourth-grade math workbook splayed open across the Formica tabletop, eraser crumbs dusting the page like snow. He’d been sitting there for two hours, she mouthed, and hadn’t finished three long division problems. Twenty minutes earlier, he’d texted his homeroom teacher’s WeChat group from her phone saying he had a fever and couldn’t come to school the next day.
I kicked off my sneakers by the door, stepped around the half-built Lego Millennium Falcon parked by the shoe rack, and sat down on the empty stool next to him. A half-eaten bowl of cherry tomatoes sweated next to the workbook, and a crumpled calligraphy practice sheet peeked out from under his pencil case. For six months I’d been coming to their seventh-floor walkup in Suzhou twice a week to tutor him in English, and this wasn’t the kid I knew. Three months before, he’d meet me at the door chattering about his math teacher’s weird new haircut, or drag me to the sideboard to show off whatever Lego set he’d finished that weekend. Now he just stared out the window at the streetlights flickering on, picking at a loose thread on his uniform sleeve.
His mom leaned against the kitchen counter, voice tight, when she explained his schedule. He has math Olympiad at 8 a.m. Saturday, Chinese composition at 2 p.m. Saturday, English with me Tuesday and Thursday evenings, calligraphy Sunday morning, swim team Sunday afternoon. Every weeknight after school, he has two to three hours of homework, plus extra practice sheets for each tutoring class. All the other kids in his class do the same, she said. If he slacks now, he won’t test into the good public middle school 20 minutes away, and then he’ll end up at the underfunded neighborhood school, and never get into a good college. She didn’t sign him up for all this because she liked dragging him across the city on weekends. She grew up in a farming town in northern Anhui, she told me once, and the national college entrance exam was the only way out she ever got. She’s just giving him the shot she never thought she’d be able to give him.
I waited until his mom went to the kitchen to heat up water for tea, then leaned in quiet so she wouldn’t hear. “Do you actually not know how to do these?” I asked. He shrugged and bit his already ragged thumbnail. “I know how,” he said. “But if I do it wrong, she’ll yell, and teacher will make me write them out three times, and then I still have Olympiad homework to do after. What’s the point?” He pushed the workbook an inch away from him, like it burned. “I just want to play Lego. Why do I have to do work every single second I’m awake?”
I didn’t give him a speech about how hard his mom works, or how important school is. I walked to the kitchen and asked his mom if we could take 20 minutes, no homework, no questions asked. She hesitated, twisting the dish towel in her hands, then nodded. She was as scared as he was, I think—she’d never seen him shut down like this. We walked down the seven flights of stairs, and Xiaoyu ran straight for the group of boys from his class kicking a shuttlecock around the courtyard. He played for 17 minutes by my count, his uniform shirt coming untucked, yelling when one of the other boys missed a kick. He stuffed two tiny fallen osmanthus sprigs in his pocket on the way back up. When we sat back down at the table, he finished all three problems in 12 minutes. He only got one wrong.
That night, after our English lesson, the three of us sat at the table and made three small changes, none of which involved pulling him out of school or quitting all extracurriculars. That’s the part most people miss when they talk about school pressure for kids in China: very few families can opt out of the system entirely, and most caregivers aren’t being cruel—they’re working with the only roadmap they have. Small, low-friction shifts work far better than grand gestures, and they don’t require fighting the school or abandoning every plan you’ve made for your kid.
First, we added a mandatory 25-minute unstructured break right after school lets out at 3:30. Before, his mom made him sit down to homework immediately, to “get it over with” before dinner. But he’d already sat through seven 40-minute classes, with only two 10-minute breaks all day, and his brain had nothing left. The rule for that break is simple: no homework questions, no quizzing him on English vocabulary while he washes his hands, no nagging about practice. He can build Lego, kick a shuttlecock, draw stupid T-Rexes fighting astronauts, or just sit on the couch and stare at the ceiling. It doesn’t have to be productive. Most days, he chooses to run around outside, and by the time he comes back up, he doesn’t drag his feet to the table.
Second, we cut one activity, not all. When we asked him straight which class he would be okay never going to again, he said calligraphy immediately. His hand ached after every two-hour session, he hated copying the same character 50 times, and he never practiced on his own. His mom had signed him up because everyone in the parent group said neat handwriting adds 5 to 10 points to the middle school entrance essay. But the two and a half hours a week he spent on calligraphy was stressing him out so much it tanked his performance in every other class. They dropped it. He kept swim team, because he gets to mess around with his friends there, and kept math Olympiad, but asked his tutor to cut the extra weekly practice packet. It’s a line any caregiver can use instead of arguing about “commitment”: “If you could stop one of your weekly activities tomorrow, which would it be?” You don’t have to cut everything, just the thing that drains energy for no real gain.
Third, we changed the homework check rule. Before, his mom would grade every problem as soon as he finished, mark every wrong answer in red pen, and make him correct it before he could move on. By the time he sat down, he was already so scared of getting something wrong that he’d freeze before he even read the prompt. When your brain is busy bracing for a lecture, there’s no room left to work through long division or sentence structure. Now, he does his homework, puts it back in his backpack, and his mom only checks that he completed every assignment, not whether the answers are right. His teacher goes over wrong answers in class the next day. In the first two weeks, his math quiz score went from a D to a B+.
Last week I showed up for our Tuesday lesson, and Xiaoyu met me at the door holding the finished Millennium Falcon, grinning, before I even kicked my shoes off. He still gets anxious before big quizzes, and still bites his nails when he’s stuck on a hard problem. His mom still slips up sometimes: two weeks ago, she signed him up for a three-day winter English intensive camp without asking him first, and they negotiated for an hour after I left, eventually agreeing he could go only if every remaining weekend of winter break was completely free. She still sees other parents posting photos of their kids’ Olympiad awards in the group chat and worries she’s letting him fall behind. Some weeks, he still stays up 20 minutes later than he should finishing composition homework.
No one made the pressure of the entrance exams go away, or changed the fact that most kids in his grade still have schedules just as packed as his was. But that 25 minutes a day, and one less class a week, was enough to get him to stop texting in fake sick days. Last week he told me he wants to try out for the school’s robotics team next semester. He doesn’t know if he’ll get in, and his mom is already worrying it will cut into math practice. For now, though, he’s doing his homework, and he’s building Lego again. That’s enough, most days.
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