Why Does a 1/2 Hour of Homework Have to Take 3 Hours? by Dr. Sherri Singer
Hi Dr. Singer,
We have a child in 5th grade who can take what should be a ½ hour of homework and turn it into 2-3 hours easily. We end up having to sit with her while she is doing it to make sure it gets done all the way and correctly. Sometimes, we end up feeling like we have done the homework for her because it is more our initiative that is getting it done. We are concerned that she is learning a very bad pattern here. Our questions are: what is causing this to happen and what do we do to make it better? We already went through the 5th grade. Help! L.B.
Hi L.B.,
While I cannot tell you exactly what is causing your daughter’s specific problem without actually evaluating her, I can tell you a lot about what I do to fix this exact problem for many kids I have seen in my practice. You see, I have met lots of kids who make extending homework and getting parents involved in homework an art form. Most of what I see in my practice has to do with kids who have multi-tasking problems. These are kids who get blown out of the proverbial water right from getting information in class. You see, they have a hard time combining visual and auditory information and committing that to memory in a sequence. They lose pieces of information along the way so nothing has any flow and information does not make sense. Think about a classroom situation. The teacher is at the front of the room, usually talking. He or she may write things on the board or refer kids to pages in a book or a ditto. The child also has to write things. Each kid has to be able to combine what the teacher is saying while they are looking at the board, book or ditto and also sometimes writing at the same time. The information usually keeps coming and if a child has a problem with keeping all that information organized, which many do, they lose pieces of information along the way. This makes it necessary for them to be re-taught the same material later, during homework, thus your needed involvement, or they simply avoid it with anything else they can pay attention to (dawdling) because it is less painful and embarrassing. Kids know when they aren’t keeping up and it hurts. Not only their future chances and their attitude towards school, but also their opinion of themselves.
Some people see this problem and automatically assume it is an attention problem. I don’t believe that. With all the kids I have helped to get better at doing this multi-tasking skill, through multi-tasking training, I do not believe it is anything related to neurological functioning or brain geography in the majority of cases. It is simply an information overload that the child responds to by using bad habits. The child has not learned to sort out and organize the information into a manageable level. The child can be trained to do that.
So, what do you do about this to make it better? The answer is easy. You train the child to be able to multi-task. To be able to handle multiple levels of information at once and keep them organized in sequence. Obviously, in the scope of a column, I cannot go into great detail about all of the things I do to train kids to do this, but I do want you to know that it is highly trainable and not hard to do. It is simply a matter of changing some habits and getting her used to a certain level of information coming at her that she isn’t now used to. In the same way that they train an astronaut to go into space by exposing that person to all the things that he or she will deal with in space, I do the same thing with information.
Regarding your helping with homework, I think you are correct in assuming that a bad pattern is getting started. Your daughter is getting more and more dependent on someone always being there to help her get things done. You are doing this because you are loving parents and you do not want to see your little girl hurt, so you make sure her work gets done so she can keep going along. The problem is that someday, she will need to be able to handle it on her own. That is, unless you plan on going to College and work with her later on. Somehow, I don’t see that as a possibility, so the clear answer is, she needs to learn to do it on her own and now, before the workload becomes heavier. As the years progress, so does the work load and the difficulty of it.
Don’t panic. A lot of the kids I see start out with even worse amounts of homework time than you have described. I saw a kid once who would literally sit for 6 hours and not get anything meaningful done. Once we trained his multi-tasking ability, he was able to finish a lot of work in school, during study hall, and whatever was left took about ½ an hour. It wasn’t magic. We just made him faster on the uptake so he didn’t need it to be re-taught or re-explained. He didn’t need to sit and panic anymore because he had missed parts of what was done in class.
Sometimes there can be other things involved in the hold up, like processing speed or reading speed or reading comprehension, but again, I will point out that it is all highly trainable in the exact same way.
My guess is that long ago, your daughter got used to getting help when she didn’t understand things and got very reliant on you and that has grown. If multi-tasking is an issue for her now, then it probably has been for a long time and she developed this reliance on you as an outgrowth of the original problem. Don’t beat yourself up for not doing something a long time ago. These things are not always easy to spot until they become a crisis. That is something we all do. Just take care of it now so it doesn’t go further and cause her to hate school or feel bad.
I do recommend that you do some work on her processing skills to help her to become an expert information processor and to get more independent with her work. It will make you and her feel a lot better. The longer you wait, the more buried you will all become in homework. Call again if you want me to help. If not, good luck and hang in there!
We have a child in 5th grade who can take what should be a ½ hour of homework and turn it into 2-3 hours easily. We end up having to sit with her while she is doing it to make sure it gets done all the way and correctly. Sometimes, we end up feeling like we have done the homework for her because it is more our initiative that is getting it done. We are concerned that she is learning a very bad pattern here. Our questions are: what is causing this to happen and what do we do to make it better? We already went through the 5th grade. Help! L.B.
Hi L.B.,
While I cannot tell you exactly what is causing your daughter’s specific problem without actually evaluating her, I can tell you a lot about what I do to fix this exact problem for many kids I have seen in my practice. You see, I have met lots of kids who make extending homework and getting parents involved in homework an art form. Most of what I see in my practice has to do with kids who have multi-tasking problems. These are kids who get blown out of the proverbial water right from getting information in class. You see, they have a hard time combining visual and auditory information and committing that to memory in a sequence. They lose pieces of information along the way so nothing has any flow and information does not make sense. Think about a classroom situation. The teacher is at the front of the room, usually talking. He or she may write things on the board or refer kids to pages in a book or a ditto. The child also has to write things. Each kid has to be able to combine what the teacher is saying while they are looking at the board, book or ditto and also sometimes writing at the same time. The information usually keeps coming and if a child has a problem with keeping all that information organized, which many do, they lose pieces of information along the way. This makes it necessary for them to be re-taught the same material later, during homework, thus your needed involvement, or they simply avoid it with anything else they can pay attention to (dawdling) because it is less painful and embarrassing. Kids know when they aren’t keeping up and it hurts. Not only their future chances and their attitude towards school, but also their opinion of themselves.
Some people see this problem and automatically assume it is an attention problem. I don’t believe that. With all the kids I have helped to get better at doing this multi-tasking skill, through multi-tasking training, I do not believe it is anything related to neurological functioning or brain geography in the majority of cases. It is simply an information overload that the child responds to by using bad habits. The child has not learned to sort out and organize the information into a manageable level. The child can be trained to do that.
So, what do you do about this to make it better? The answer is easy. You train the child to be able to multi-task. To be able to handle multiple levels of information at once and keep them organized in sequence. Obviously, in the scope of a column, I cannot go into great detail about all of the things I do to train kids to do this, but I do want you to know that it is highly trainable and not hard to do. It is simply a matter of changing some habits and getting her used to a certain level of information coming at her that she isn’t now used to. In the same way that they train an astronaut to go into space by exposing that person to all the things that he or she will deal with in space, I do the same thing with information.
Regarding your helping with homework, I think you are correct in assuming that a bad pattern is getting started. Your daughter is getting more and more dependent on someone always being there to help her get things done. You are doing this because you are loving parents and you do not want to see your little girl hurt, so you make sure her work gets done so she can keep going along. The problem is that someday, she will need to be able to handle it on her own. That is, unless you plan on going to College and work with her later on. Somehow, I don’t see that as a possibility, so the clear answer is, she needs to learn to do it on her own and now, before the workload becomes heavier. As the years progress, so does the work load and the difficulty of it.
Don’t panic. A lot of the kids I see start out with even worse amounts of homework time than you have described. I saw a kid once who would literally sit for 6 hours and not get anything meaningful done. Once we trained his multi-tasking ability, he was able to finish a lot of work in school, during study hall, and whatever was left took about ½ an hour. It wasn’t magic. We just made him faster on the uptake so he didn’t need it to be re-taught or re-explained. He didn’t need to sit and panic anymore because he had missed parts of what was done in class.
Sometimes there can be other things involved in the hold up, like processing speed or reading speed or reading comprehension, but again, I will point out that it is all highly trainable in the exact same way.
My guess is that long ago, your daughter got used to getting help when she didn’t understand things and got very reliant on you and that has grown. If multi-tasking is an issue for her now, then it probably has been for a long time and she developed this reliance on you as an outgrowth of the original problem. Don’t beat yourself up for not doing something a long time ago. These things are not always easy to spot until they become a crisis. That is something we all do. Just take care of it now so it doesn’t go further and cause her to hate school or feel bad.
I do recommend that you do some work on her processing skills to help her to become an expert information processor and to get more independent with her work. It will make you and her feel a lot better. The longer you wait, the more buried you will all become in homework. Call again if you want me to help. If not, good luck and hang in there!
January 17, 2003 HEALTHWATCH~Originally printed in Lakeland Newspapers
By Dr. Sherri Singer, Psy.D.
Contact
224-548-7269
Dr. Singer's areas of expertise involve cognitive ways of helping parents with child motivation, processing skills, learning and homework improvement, behavior prevention as well as processing based brain training. She does not work with severe Psychological conditions or people with serious Psychological issues. If you feel you have those kinds of issues, you can let Dr. Singer know and she will make appropriate referrals for you to get the type of expert and help you need. If anyone viewing this site or any other of Dr. Singer's social media pages feels suicidal, self destructive or like they could harm someone else, or they know someone in that situation, they need to get themselves or the other person to an emergency room and/or call 911 immediately for help.