Is Homework a Waste of Time? What Happens When You Watch Your Kid Struggle Through It
The worksheet had six questions left. My son was on question three, and his pencil had been hovering over the blank for a full minute. He wasn’t thinking. He was waiting, the way a cat waits for a door to open. Eventually he wrote something—any answer—and moved on. I watched from the kitchen counter, half drying a spoon, and thought: This is a waste of time. All of it.
It was a Tuesday evening in March. The assignment was a page of multiplication problems, the kind where you fill in the box with the missing number. His teacher had sent home a packet on Monday, due Friday. We were on day two, and already there had been a snack break, a bathroom trip, and a brief negotiation about whether he could do it in the living room instead. I knew the math facts mattered. I also knew he already knew them. So what was the point?
I didn’t say anything that night. I just stood there, drying the spoon, and tried to remember what homework had been like for me. Mostly I remembered the same thing: worksheets, reading logs, a diorama of a wetland that my dad helped me build out of papier-mâché. I couldn’t recall a single skill I’d learned from those pages. But I did remember the feeling of a deadline, and the vague sense that schoolwork was something you endured rather than enjoyed.
The next day I texted a friend whose daughter was in the same class. “Is this homework normal?” I asked, attaching a photo of the packet. She responded with a screenshot of her own kitchen table, covered in crayons and a torn piece of notebook paper. “She calls it her ‘work,'” my friend wrote. “I call it her ‘hour of mutual frustration.'” We both laughed, but we were both half serious.
What changed was a conversation I had later that week with my son’s teacher. I’d asked for a quick parent-teacher conference, mostly to talk about homework. I had a list of softly rehearsed questions: Is this really necessary? Does it help? He already knows these facts, so why does he have to do them four times? She listened without interrupting, which I appreciated. Then she said something that made me pause.
“Honestly,” she said, “I assign the packet because the school expects it. But I don’t expect it to teach math. I expect it to teach them to sit with something they’d rather avoid.”
I almost laughed. “So you’re giving them practice in being bored?”
She smiled. “Sort of. But I’m also giving them practice in finishing. And I’m giving them practice in noticing when they don’t understand something. The math is the vehicle. The real skill is the habit of not giving up.”
That shifted something for me. But it also raised a new question: how much of homework is genuine practice, and how much is just compliance? And is compliance itself a skill worth practicing? I looked at my son that evening, slouched in the chair, and tried to tell the difference. He’d finished the page, but the margin was full of doodles. He’d answered every question, but three of them were wrong—the same three he’d guessed at the night before.
So I tried something different. Instead of saying “check your work,” which he had heard two hundred thousand times and learned to ignore, I said, “Pick one question you think you might have guessed on.” He picked one. I asked him to explain how he got his answer. He said, “I just did it.” I asked again, slower. “What did you do first?” He shrugged. “I looked at the numbers and then I wrote something.”
We sat there for a moment. He was waiting for me to get annoyed. I was waiting for something else. Then I said, “What if you put the numbers into a story? Like, if there were twelve kids and they split into groups of three, how many groups?” He thought about it. “Four,” he said. I pointed to the problem on the page. “That’s what that question was asking.” He looked at the paper with a kind of mild surprise. “Oh,” he said. “I thought it was just a trick.”
That was the moment I started to change my mind. Not about homework exactly—I still think much of it is busywork. But about what makes the busywork matter. It isn’t the repetition. It’s the moment when someone sits with the confusion and finds a way through. And that’s not something a worksheet can teach by itself. It needs an adult to help bridge the gap between the abstract symbol and the actual world.
After that, I tried a few small adjustments at home. I stopped telling him to “finish” and started setting a timer for ten minutes of focused work, followed by a break. I asked him to teach me a problem instead of just doing it. I gave him one chance to explain a wrong answer before I corrected it. None of this turned homework into fun. But it did turn our kitchen table from a battlefield into something more neutral. The emotions were still there, but they were quieter.
I also started paying attention to what was actually a waste of time versus what was just making me uncomfortable. For example, the reading log was, in my opinion, terrible. It required him to write down the title, author, minutes read, and a one-sentence summary every night. That sentence was always the same: “The book was about a kid who did something.” It felt like punishment for reading. So I asked his teacher if we could skip it. She said yes. She even said she’d never loved the log herself.
That made me realize something: the homework isn’t monolithic. Some of it is useful, some of it is not, and a lot of whether it feels useless depends on how we as adults handle it. My son still does the math packet. Some nights he finishes in ten minutes, correct and cheerful. Other nights he stares at the paper like it’s written in a language he doesn’t speak. On those nights, I don’t push. I say, “Let’s do two, and then we’ll stop.” Usually, after two, he’s back on track. Sometimes he isn’t. Sometimes he closes the notebook and I let it go.
I still don’t know if homework is a waste of time. I think the honest answer is: it depends on the assignment, the child, and what you do with it. I know that for my son, the habit of sitting with something boring or hard is useful. I also know that a page of thirty identical problems isn’t teaching him anything except how to go through the motions. The real work happens in the gaps—when he guesses, when he stalls, when he almost gives up. That’s where I’m learning to step in.
He’s in the other room now, doing this week’s packet. I can hear his pencil stopping and starting. I don’t know if he’s guessing or thinking. Maybe I’ll ask him afterward to tell me about the one that felt hardest. Maybe I’ll just make dinner. Either way, we’ll both get through it. That, at least, doesn’t feel like a waste.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Is Homework a Waste of Time