How I Helped My Kid Through a Homework Crisis
It's so hard to be supportive without taking over. Here's what I did.
Two weeks ago, on Monday evening at 8:30pm, my 11-year-old walked into my room in tears.
“I’m not going to finish my social studies project in time,” he wailed. “I don’t know what to do.”
He’d been working on the project all weekend. It was part of much bigger, very cool year-long project in which the students are creating a new civilization from scratch. They have to design a government, belief systems, laws, currency, and more. For this particular part of the project, they had been tasked with designing a building that would showcase the civilization’s approach to architecture. My son had decided that his civilization would boast the tallest skyscraper in the world, and he had taken to Minecraft to design it, block-by-block.
You can imagine where this is going. Even though my son had worked on the assignment for many, many hours, he was four hours to deadline and wasn’t even close to being done — because his skyscraper was supposed to be 100 stories tall. (He explained to me that this translated into a height of 300 Minecraft blocks. And there’s no cutting and pasting in Minecraft, so he had to add them one-by-one.)
Usually, I don’t get very involved in my kids’ schoolwork unless they ask for help. Every Monday, I check in with them, asking what they have going on that week to get them thinking about plans and time management. Sometimes in these conversations one of my kids will say something like, “Oh yeah, I have a math test on Thursday — can you help me study for it?” But most of the time, they say that not much is happening or that everything’s under control, and I trust them and let them be, because I know that letting them feel in charge gives them independence and self-confidence and because I know that any mistakes they make will be opportunities for learning and growth. I also know from research that meddling too much in kids’ schoolwork can make them feel incompetent — something I talk about in my book.
On this particular Monday evening, I knew that my son had been working on his building for a while, but I didn’t know much more than that.
As he stood before me in tears, yes, I was thinking oh shit, but I also recognized that this was going to be an important parenting moment. I reminded myself that as an autonomy-supportive parent, I wanted to find a way to help him get through this difficult experience, help him figure out what his options were, and (maybe) help him learn something — but that I ultimately wanted him to decide what to do and how to do it. I definitely didn’t want to take over and do the project for him (even though part of me desperately wanted to).
I’m going to share what happened next, not because I think there’s one right way to handle situations like this or that I handled it “perfectly,” but because I know from your feedback that you like reading about how I handle challenging parenting situations. Of course, how a parent handles a situation like this also depends on their child’s age, temperament and past experiences.
I also asked my son for permission before sharing this story.