Who Is Homework Really For?
Schools assign homework.
Parents expect it.
Children do it.
Nobody asks why.
If your child spends eight hours at school, what went wrong that learning has to continue at the dinner table?
Why are you paying a school to outsource teaching to you?
Homework doesn't build responsibility.
It builds compliance.
It rewards the kids who've learned to shut up and do what they're told.
The unspoken belief: children left alone will waste time.
So we fill their evenings with busywork. And we feel righteous about it.
They're doing homework. They're being productive. They're being good.
That's not parenting. That's fear dressed as discipline.
A nine-year-old crying over fractions at 9 PM.
A parent losing their temper over a worksheet.
A house full of tension instead of conversation.
That's not learning. That's suffering.
If homework helped, teachers would use it as feedback.
They'd ask, "What did you struggle with?"
They'd slow down. Revisit. Adjust.
That almost never happens.
The teacher moves on. A tick gets added. The system marches forward.
Decades of research say the same thing: homework doesn't help young children learn. The correlation is nearly zero.
We keep assigning it anyway.
Children without homework do remarkable things.
They practice piano. Train in ballet. Build. Read. Code. Cook. Daydream.
They go deep.
Depth requires time. Homework steals it.
Here's the harder truth.
Homework reveals a school's failure.
If learning isn't happening during school hours, why is that your problem to fix at home?
"But I did homework and I turned out fine."
Did you?
Or did you learn to comply? To do pointless tasks without asking why? To measure your worth by how well you followed instructions?
You turned out fine despite homework. Not because of it.
Homework isn't sacred.
It isn't inevitable.
It persists because we stopped questioning it.
And our children pay the price every evening.
