How Much Total School and Cram School Time Do Kids Get, And What Parents Should Know
Last Tuesday I was folding laundry at the kitchen table at 7:45 pm when the front door clicked open, and my 13-year-old Mia dropped her two canvas bags by the shoe rack: one for regular middle school, one twice as heavy for cram. I bent to pick up a crumpled piece of paper that fell out of her math workbook, and it was a half-written note to her best friend: “I haven’t had time to add new stickers to my album in 3 months. I don’t even remember what it feels like to not have homework after dinner.”
I’d been curious about adding up her total structured learning time for a while, so I pulled out my phone calculator that night after she fell asleep asleep on her desk mid-homework. Regular school runs 8 am to 3:30 pm, five days a week, that’s 37.5 hours. Cram school adds three hours each on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday after school, plus four hours on Saturday morning: that’s 13 more hours. Add 15 minutes of commute each way to cram, that’s another hour and 15 minutes. Total just for school and cram: 51 hours and 45 minutes a week. That’s more than the 40-hour full-time work week most adults work. I sat there for a minute, because I’d signed her up for cram six months earlier for the upcoming high school entrance exam, and I never actually added it all up. I just knew it was what everyone did.
The next morning at breakfast I asked her how it felt. She shrugged, spread peanut butter on her toast, and said “It’s fine. All my friends go. If I don’t go, I won’t get into the district top high school.” No big outburst, no dramatic breakdown—just the kind of quiet acceptance that scares me more than yelling.
As a former fourth grade teacher, I know the assumption that more time studying equals better results is deeply ingrained for a lot of families. But I’ve watched for years how this plays out for kids: after a certain threshold, more time doesn’t equal more learning. It just equals more tiredness. Kids stop retaining information, they stop asking questions, they just go through the motions. Most parents don’t stop to add up the total time because cram becomes just another part of the routine, so the weight of it stays invisible. I was guilty of that too.
I didn’t yank her out of cram cold turkey— that’s not realistic for our situation, or for most families gearing up for a high-stakes exam. Instead, we sat down after dinner on Sunday, got a spiral notebook, and did a time audit together, mapping every 30-minute block of her week. We found two small, low-friction changes we could make that didn’t require dropping all extra support.
First, there was a 20-minute gap between when regular school got out and when cram started, that Mia spent hanging out on the school playground scrolling TikTok with friends, because neither of us wanted her to walk home and back just for 20 minutes. She admitted she was already worn out by the time cram started, and couldn’t pay attention to the first hour of lecture. We rearranged: she takes the school bus to our house, gets a 25-minute nap on the couch, I pack her a warm snack, and I drive her to cram. That 25 minutes of rest means she’s actually awake and taking notes for the whole cram session, so she gets more out of the time she’s there.
Second, we cut one of the three weekly cram sessions. The one we cut was a general review of material she’d already mastered in regular school, and we talked to her cram teacher about it, who agreed she only needed the two targeted problem-solving sessions for the tricky algebra concepts she struggled with. That cut three full hours of structured time a week, no loss of the help she actually needed.
That extra three hours is now fully hers. One afternoon a week, no cram, no scheduled tutoring, no homework unless it’s a tiny, time-sensitive assignment. She spends it getting ice cream with her friend, sorting stickers, or binging silly cartoon clips on the couch. It’s not a lot of time, but it’s hers.
For parents who can’t cut cram time—if the exam is just a few months away, or your cram program doesn’t allow dropping individual classes—there’s one tiny change you can make that doesn’t require any negotiation or big schedule overhauls: add one 10-minute unstructured block every single day. No screens, no homework, no adult-directed activity. Let your kid do whatever they want in that 10 minutes: sort stickers, bounce a ball in the backyard, doodle, just sit and stare out the window. It’s such a small chunk of time it won’t set back any study goals, but it gives kids a guaranteed little piece of their week that belongs only to them. I did this when we were still doing all three cram sessions, and even that 10 minutes made a noticeable difference in how irritable Mia was at the end of the day.
Three months later, Mia’s math scores are still steady, actually up a tiny bit from when she was attending every cram session. She remembered her best friend’s birthday this month and bought her a bracelet with her own allowance, something she’d missed the year before. We still have 48 hours a week of structured school and cram, which is still a lot. The entrance exam is still eight months away, and I worry sometimes that we’re still asking too much of her. There’s no perfect fix, not when the system is set up to reward more time spent studying. But stopping to add up all the time, and making two tiny, easy changes, made a big difference for our family. Last weekend, I walked past her desk and saw her sticker album open, with three new K-pop stickers she ordered online stuck in, labeled with the date she got them. That’s enough for right now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » How Much Total School and Cram School Time Do Kids Get, And What Parents Should Know