How To Act When A Child Refuses To Do Homework

What can I do about a child who refuses to do homework?

For a child that refuses to do homework, you can consider a couple of effective tools that you have as a parent. One, you can have a conference with your child's teacher to get a sense of why, from the teacher's perspective, is the youngster refusing. There could be a number of reasons for that: fear, lack of confidence, not understanding the basic concepts, missing some pieces. It may not be absolute refusal, it may be a sign of frustration, so a parent-teacher conference can help clear that up.If it is a defiant activity, then the parent needs to sort of probe a little bit to find what the student is reacting against. Often times there's been trauma, and that's one of the signs, that there's trauma in the child's life, and he's taking it out in this manner of refusing to do homework because he has control of that. "You, as a parent, aren't going to force me to learn. I'm going to teach you because I'm upset with you because you're divorcing my daddy" -- something like that. You need to find out if it's because of defiance -- there's something there. It's not the homework in and of itself. Or it may be that the level of homework is too high for the youngster, but the teacher and the parent can both resolve that, by a conference, by communication.