Is Homework a Waste of Time? A Parent’s Honest Question
The kitchen table was covered with a math worksheet, a pencil, and a small boy who was pretending to be a statue. My son, seven years old, had been sitting in the same position for almost five minutes. The pencil was in his hand, hovering over the first problem. His eyes were fixed on the numbers. But nothing was happening. I knew that look. It wasn’t concentration. It was dread.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I don’t get this,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
That night’s assignment was thirty subtraction problems. He’d done three. The rest were blank. We were only one week into the school year, and I could already feel the familiar nightly tension building in my shoulders. I wanted to help. I also wanted to bang my head against the kitchen cabinet. But I kept my voice calm and said, “Let’s just try one.”
He looked at me like I’d asked him to solve a mystery. I pulled out a handful of crayons to show him what borrowing meant. He got the fourth problem right. Then the fifth. Then he stopped again, tears starting to pool in his eyes.
I sat there, watching him wipe his face with the back of his hand, and I asked myself the question that had been rattling around in my brain for weeks: Is this thing a waste of time?
Not just this particular worksheet. I mean homework in general. The packet of twenty pages that came home every Monday. The nightly reading log. The spelling words we drilled in the kitchen. Was it making any real difference? Or was it just a ritual that made us all exhausted and miserable?
I remember saying to my husband that night, “You know what? We’re skipping the rest of it. He needs to sleep.” He looked relieved. My son’s shoulders dropped when I told him to put the pencil down. He went to bed without a fuss, and I spent the evening feeling both like a rebel and a failure. The next morning, I wrote a note to his teacher, apologizing, explaining that we’d run out of steam. I expected a polite acknowledgment, maybe some gentle insistence.
But what she said surprised me.
“It’s okay,” her email read. “The homework is practice. If he can’t do it without being coached through every problem, then it’s not practice, it’s confusion. I’d rather he do five problems correctly than thirty with crying.”
That one sentence changed something for me. I realized I hadn’t been thinking about homework as a learning tool. I was treating it as an obligation, a box to check. And I was passing that stress straight to my kid. The teacher didn’t say homework was useless. She said it had a specific purpose. And if the purpose wasn’t being met, skipping it was probably the better choice.
So we started a new routine. When he got home from school, he played first. Didn’t touch a book. I made a snack, we talked about his day, and then we looked at the packet together. We didn’t try to do everything. We picked the problems that looked hardest. If he could explain how to do one in his own words, I considered that a win. If he was stuck, I used pennies or crackers to show the idea. Often, we finished in fifteen minutes. Some days, we didn’t finish at all.
I also started paying attention to what the assignments actually were. Some pages were clearly meant to be a quick check, not a grind. Others felt like busywork — the kind of worksheets that repeat the same type of problem over and over until the child is just filling in bubbles out of memory. The difference mattered. When the homework was aligned with something he’d already learned in class, it gave him a chance to show me what he knew. When it was ahead of his level, it just made him stare at the paper like a stranger had written it.
I’m not saying I figured out a great system. Some nights still go sideways. Last week, he turned a simple sorting activity into a twenty-minute negotiation over which color marker to use. Another night, I lost my temper and told him that “homework isn’t supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be practice,” which made both of us feel worse. But I’ve stopped forcing the full assignment when it’s clearly not working. I’ve learned to look for the signs: the glazed eyes, the slow breathing, the quiet “I don’t remember this.” Those are signals that what’s on the page isn’t doing its job.
What became more important to me was the habit of showing up to a hard thing and giving it a few minutes of honest effort. That’s a real skill, even if the worksheet itself gets tossed into the recycle bin. I began asking my son to do just one problem after a timer ran for five minutes. If he could do that, I’d tell him he was done. Some evenings he’d get into it after the first one and keep going. Most evenings he didn’t, and that was fine.
There’s a bigger conversation here about educational policies and what homework is for. I’m not a researcher. I don’t have data about whether homework improves test scores. But I do have a kitchen table, and I have a child who used to cry over subtraction. I know the difference between something that helps him feel more confident and something that makes him feel stupid. The worksheet isn’t the enemy. The way we treat it is.
For now, our rules are pretty simple. If the assignment is doable, we do it. If it’s not, we stop and write a note to the teacher. I try not to use candy as a reward, but I do sometimes sit beside him and do my own math problems, just to show him that everyone struggles with numbers now and then. We take breaks. We do five instead of thirty. And I’ve told him that any homework that makes him feel like he’s getting worse at something gets tossed into the “talk to your teacher” pile.
I still ask myself if this is all a waste of time. Honestly, some days it still feels that way. But I’ve come to realize that the question isn’t really about homework. It’s about who gets to decide what counts as useful. That’s a question I can’t answer alone. I just know that last night, he finished his reading log in one sitting — not because I forced him, but because he’d picked a book about volcanoes and couldn’t put it down. The homework was still homework. But for fifteen minutes, the time didn’t feel wasted to either of us. That might be enough.
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