Why you should refuse to let your kids do homework.

That’s right. It’s time to start a revolution.

I hate homework. Hate, hate, hate it. I want to see it banned for primary school kids. And now, experts are agreeing with me.

Psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg is urging parents to, “rise up against the tyranny of primary school homework”.

He told the Daily Telegraph that homework provides, “absolutely no academic benefit” for younger students. There’s plenty of research backing him up. It doesn’t seem to make sense, but it’s true.

Dr Carr-Gregg thinks primary schools should stop giving traditional homework and focus on life skills instead.

“I would be putting it on the parents to educate the schools about what is the current thinking around homework,” Dr Carr-Gregg says. 

“If the school is consistently not receptive to the idea, I would write over my kid’s homework, ‘Sleep was more important, I gave them permission to do this.'”

Yep, you heard him. Rise up and revolt against those endless worksheets set as homework. It’s ruining your kids’ enjoyment of childhood. Not to mention our enjoyment of parenthood.

Homework makes my afternoons miserable. My seven-year-old daughter comes home from school and wants to read or play outside. I suggest she does her homework. She doesn't. I grab her worksheets out of her bag and put them in front of her. She wanders off. I get firm and sit her down in front of her homework. She finally appears to be doing it. I find she has spent 15 minutes colouring in a picture on the maths sheet. I tell her off. And so on.

This is not how I want to spend my free time with my daughter. And this happens day after day after day. (Give her a break. She's SEVEN.)

So you have a young child who happily sits and does homework, without fuss, after school? That's fantastic! Your child is obviously already showing initiative and discipline and will clearly go far in life. These type of kids don't need to waste their evenings doing homework.

I have a friend whose daughter goes to a primary school in Melbourne, not some alternative-hippie-type school, just the local public school. At the start of each term, the kids get a list of activities, things like taking photos of old buildings near their home or inventing a game. Each week, they choose one of these activities to do. And that's their "homework".

I would love this. My daughter would love this. It would be great to have activities we could work on together where she's learning something but we're both having a good time. It would be way better than forcing her to do sums or write out spelling words, over and over. Why can't more schools be forward-thinking like this?

That time of day when my daughter gets home from school is precious to me. On school days, we only have a few hours of free time together. I want to spend it hanging out and chatting and having a bit of a laugh and strengthening our relationship. I don't want to spend it nagging her.

Apparently, one of the reasons that primary schools give kids so much homework nowadays is that parents are demanding it. Which parents? Put your hands up! Okay, you and you. Go and stand in the corner. Then read the research. No academic benefit for primary school kids. (Or very little, anyway.)

Please stop asking teachers for more homework. I want my afternoons back.

How do you feel about primary school students doing homework?

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