Homework sessions can take the form of one or both parents sitting down with the child to do their joint homework. Parents may use arguments, reasoning, logic, reminding, threatening, or pleading to push the child through each step. The harder the parent works to help, often the less the child accomplishes.

Homework Help Hell (HHH)

The greatest harm can result from the best intentions. It sounds like a paradox, but kindness and good intentions can be an insidious path to destruction. Sometimes doing what seems right is wrong and can cause harm.
--Terry Goodkind

When the child arrives home, Homework Help Hell may begin.

When children struggle at school, it often overflows into homework. This has become a mounting problem for all children, since the average time they spend doing homework is up 51% between 1981 and 1997, particularly for younger children.

Helping their child with homework is an almost universal experience for parents. Unfortunately, it often looks more like an inquisition than an enriching, pleasant family educational experience. Not only is HHH a hellish experience for children, it is also hell for their parents. Parents may suffer more than children in the battle over homework because they often feel more pressure than the child does to get it done.

Working very hard to push the child by explaining something while their child seems to become less attentive, more passive, more emotional and non-understanding is a common frustrating and exhausting experience. Parent's frustration usually shows. As they get more upset, the child resonates with this and also becomes more upset.

As one mother put it, "He becomes very agitated and restless when we try to do homework as if his feet want to run away with his body. These homework sessions normally end with me being very angry and frustrated and Josh in tears. I start to get knots in my stomach when it gets to be homework time. He will sit for long periods of time with minimal fidgeting when being read to, but if asked to read himself, his body becomes tense, his breathing gets shallow and he becomes agitated and hyper-fidgety. His eyes have a hard time staying on the book. He can be VERY quick to anger… and his emotions are becoming more extreme and seem to erupt with very little provocation he will begin screaming and slamming doors after the most benign requests. "

As we all know from our own experience, arousal does not increase our ability to think clearly. In the example above, arousal saps the child's attentional resources, thus further reducing his ability to complete homework. This further frustrates the parent. A downward spiraling feedback loop develops in which everyone loses. It makes the parent feel very helpless and frustrated. Though many parents realize that this approach is not working, they continue it for lack of a better alternative.

HHH emerges when emotions dominate the learning experience. The technicalities of solving math problems or learning spelling lists recedes to the background as anger, frustration and anxiety permeate the air.

After walking through the hot emotional fires of HHH, parents also develop conditioned emotional responses to the homework process. They begin to dread homework time as much as the child does. It feels phobic. Parents I work with describe emotionally wrenching homework sessions filled with feelings of frustration, anger, and anxiety. They begin to feel as if their child's lack of success rejects upon them. They feel like failures as parents. One mother described HHH as: "Being in a Nathan prison."

For many parents, HHH is their biggest family problem. The long hours of battles absorb their time and their life. Free time becomes non-existent. Every spare moment is absorbed by HHH. Homework becomes a black hole that all of the family's energy, resources and happiness are sucked into it. Often, the process puts stress on the marriage.

As obvious as this emotional arousal is, its impact on schoolwork, homework and family happiness is little understood and seldom effectively addressed. In order to break this destructive cycle, one has to focus on the emotional dynamics that drive this chain reaction rather than on the intellectual content of the homework itself. When the emotional issues for both parent and child are resolved, there are often dramatic improvements in the apparent academic skills, homework completion, behavior problems and family happiness.

Case Study: Arousal inhibits performance

By the age of seven, Phillip had learned HHH well. He said he hated homework and postponed it as long as possible, sometimes forever. When initially forced by his parents to sit down to do his homework, not much happened. He would sit in front of his books for hours and look out the window, play with a piece of paper, or make shapes with his fingers. There was no sense of struggle, except when directly pressured by his parents. His mother, Janet, would sit with him for hours working on his assignments. In fact, she would even take dictation for him.

Since Janet believed Phillip could not actually write out his ideas when he had to write a story, a book report, or a science project, she would sit at the computer typing what he told her. Of course, she would then edit and reorganize his work so that it sounded much better. Often, they would be up late at night finishing a long-term project that Janet had not heard about until the night before it was due. She worked very hard to complete the assignment, while Phillip looked around the room, taunted his little brother or played.

When I met Phillip and his family, it was apparent that he did not want to be in my office. He rocked in his chair, interrupted his parents and my conversation, moved from chair to chair and squirmed. To simulate homework discomfort, I had him read a book. Rather than sound out words he did not know, he would guess. Then he would look to me to see if he was right, which he seldom was. To flush out the emotional component of his reading dififculty, I gave him little help and kept redirecting him back to reading. As I pressured him to keep reading, he grimaced, squirmed and his feet and legs bounced. I asked him what his legs and feet felt like. He said it felt like he wanted to run.

Three days later, following treatment, he was excited with his new found reading ability and wanted to show off for his parents. Instead of squirming, he was attentive and relaxed. Following treatment, HHH became a thing of the past for his mother.

How did that happen? I did not change his brain structures or teach him reading. I gave him no magic medicine. In a nutshell, with the help of my patented psychotherapy technology, Computer Aided Emotional Restructuring, CAER, I was able to extinguish the negative affect in Phillip surrounding schoolwork as well as the overly emotional reactions by his parents in maintaining their part of the dysfunctional interaction pattern between them. How CAER works is explained in detail in another article on this site (link).

Here is Phillips treatment story.

Phillip had said reading made him want to run. At that point, it was time to start extinguishing those feelings. I put him in the CAER machine and had him think about the want to run feeling and all the places he could remember it.

Occasionally, while in the CAER machine, Phillip would kick his legs hard trying to get that "want to run" feeling out of them. However, what worked better than kicking was focusing his attention on those feelings and all the situations he could remember them in. We had to work on this for almost an hour before the feeling went away in all the places he could remember, such as sitting in school, doing homework, listening to adults talk, and riding in the back seat of the car. Reviewing the "want to run" memories, while in the dream like state created by CAER, made him quite tired. When the sense of agitation finally went away, he fell asleep for a few minutes. I let him sleep for a little while since he had worked very hard. I wanted him refreshed for another go at reading.

He again began to read. His style was much different than it had been on the first go around. Rather than wanting to run, he was more in contact with the book and there was no grimacing and very little wiggling. When he encountered a hard word, he would attempt to sound it out. When he took the time to do this, vs. guessing, he was actually quite good at phonetics. He was now engaged with reading and though at times frustrated by not knowing a word, he was also very pleased with himself when he could sound out a hard word. We cycled through this process several more times working on the “hard word feeling. He continued to improve.

He had been disengaged from the process of learning so long that he had some clear reading and vocabulary deficits. However, he was reading much better than when he first began. He could now focus on the reading task without distraction. He now found it fun in a challenging way.

For 3 years I  continued to be in email contact with Phillip's family. He is now a strong reader who reads on his own for pleasure. His overall academic performance is also far better than it was prior to treatment, with a mixture of A's and B's. Moreover, homework is no longer hell for anyone.