Because the Best Mom is a Happy Mom
As a parent, how to raise self-reliant kids is a hard question.
We all want kids who take care of themselves and their families, but many families struggle with how to get there.
These simple, yet far from easy, parenting tips are a great place to start.
Dread your middle schooler’s homework every night? These tips for middle school parents will guide you in effective homework strategies.
There I was, sitting in my son’s 7th grade Parent-Teacher conferences, listening to the Literature teacher tell me the same thing I have heard for the past few years at every single conference…
“Your son is very bright, well-behaved, an absolutely pleasure in class. However, he doesn’t seem to get his homework done. And our first test of the year didn’t go very well for him.”
As a parent, I dreaded my daughter entering middle school.
Middle school was the most trying time of my childhood.
I came from a rather strict and sheltered elementary school. There were 10 students in my sixth-grade classroom. We were taught by Sister Mary Clare and I wore a uniform every day.
And puberty hit me hard. I gained 50 pounds in what seemed overnight.
I felt uncomfortable and awkward in my own body.
Middle school was like throwing me to the wolves.
I prepared my daughter for how mean kids could be.
And I taught her to always wear deoderant (because I made that mistake).
I made sure she was always in a physical activity so that she’d know her body was strong.
But the mental overwhelm caught me by surprise.
I get a panic attack every time I open up Facebook. Well-meaning parents post activity after activity to do with your kids at home.
Some take massive amounts of set up.
Others take enormous time.
Is this what I’m supposed to do when my kids are schooling from home? Is this my duty as a parent to set up these structured school days, intricate lessons and devote most of my waking hours to my kids education?
Nope. Flat out no.
I’m going to be blunt.
Right now, your child’s homework time just plain sucks.
It does.
You dread it every night. “Hey, have you done your math homework yet?
“NO! I can’t do my homework. I don’t want to do it yet. Can’t I watch TV? I’ll do it after dinner.”
So much back and forth and back and forth. It’s become too much.
The question is, how do you make your child want to do homework?
How do you make homework less boring?
It’s 6pm on a Thursday and I get a frantic text from a friend. Her daughter goes to the same school as mine.
“Hey, does your daughter have the math test from 2 months ago? The teacher is letting Celina retake it but she can’t find it.”
“Yeah, hold on, let me ask her.”
My daughter does have the test – which she doesn’t hand over right away because she wants to know exactly why she needs it, what it will be used for… third degree basically.
Satisfied with all my answers,she opens her binder to the math section, pulls out the test and hands it to me.
“Thanks,” my friend texts back, “I don’t know what Celina did with it.”
What do we do when our kids refuse to do homework?
They fight us. They act defiantly. We know they need to do it but as convincing as we try to be, they fight even harder.
Carly, mom of a 10-year-old boy knows this well.
Each night she steels herself for the inevitable homework battle. Her son sits at the kitchen table where she tries to motivate him, encourage him… sometimes bribe with dessert.
But every night, he pushes back.
My daughter used to leave the kitchen table and throw herself on the couch.
“I can’t DO it,” she wailed, “It’s TOO hard.”
Every afternoon became a neverending negotiation – one I dreaded.
I just wanted to pour myself a glass of wine and hide in the closet.
What do you do at that point?
Tell me if this sounds familiar.
Your child brings home a page of a page of double-digit subtraction problems.
You know… the kind where you have to “borrow” from the tens place to do the operation in the ones place.
You got this, you think…
But no, your kid politely informs you. You aren’t supposed to borrow. Instead, your child needs to use a method where he “counts up” from the number.
What in the world? This isn’t subtraction…at least not the way you learned it.
How are you expected to help your kid when the method doesn’t even make sense?
Does it seem like your child has a lot more homework than you did at her age?
The vocabulary, the spelling, the math homework sheet and then the required 20 minutes of reading… all in first grade??
How can you possibly keep your child focused during it all?
