How to Relieve Homework Anxiety

No one enjoys being told how to spend their free time, so it's no surprise that when children of all ages get home from school, they resent having more work. Some kids take this in stride, but many children become anxious about completing homework assignments. Parents, while not completing the assignments for their children, can use strategies to help relieve some of this homework anxiety.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

1. Establish a homework schedule. First, find the specific block of time each day that works best for your child to be most productive. This should be the same time and at the same location every day with as few distractions and interruptions as possible.

2. Assist your child with organizing and planning assignments. This type of help builds solid work habits that your child is sure to carry with him from year to year. Enlist the use of planners, journals and agendas to relieve your child from committing every homework task to memory.

3. Categorize homework assignments. Suggest to your child that she do the easiest and shortest assignments first. This will build a sense of accomplishment and make your child feel like she is making progress, thereby relieving some anxiety.

4. Increase your involvement in your child's school life. When you stay connected to this part of his day, you have a better understanding of what is expected of your child. If you get a good grasp of what's going on, you can pass on that knowledge to your child to make expectations clear.

5. Set a specific amount of time for each homework assignment. Start by having your child keep track of starting and stopping times for tasks so that she will know for future assignments how long each task should take. Try to limit the time she spends on concepts she is having trouble with; instead, write a note to the teacher to make her aware of the problem area.

6. Develop successful textbook assignment strategies. When working with longer chapters and a lot of information, teach your child to review chapter end questions first. This way, he will have an idea of what the important concepts are while reading the text.

7. Offer up tons of praise and encouragement. Try to be positive in all your communications, verbal and nonverbal, with your child regarding her homework. When you stay positive and allow for imperfections in his assignments, she will know that mistakes are part of the learning process and feelings of anxiety can be kept to a minimum.

Tips & Warnings

• If you feel the need to check over your child's homework assignments, review the correct problems before moving on to ones that need to be done over. Point out how well he did on these problems.
• Between assignments, be sure to allow for a short break period. This will refresh your child before she begins the next task.
• Do not hover over your child while he does his homework. This will foster dependency on you for him to complete his homework, and you can't be with him in the classroom where independence is key.
• Do not finish your child's homework assignments for her; it will make her feel inadequate. She will feel that she will never be able to complete a task as well as you.

Resources

• Get more help at FamilyEducation.com