One question parents often ask me is why does their child take more than twice or three times as long to do homework as the rest of their classmates and what can they do about it. This article presents three tricks that parents can use to reduce the stress that this situation causes them and to get their children to be faster with tasks.
Why they take time to do homework
Children who experience homework problems typically share the following characteristics:
1 - They present important attention problems both in class and when doing homework.
2 - They often have visual perception problems and skip words or entire lines when reading, or have difficulty copying information from the blackboard or textbook.
3 - They get tense when doing homework and often feel lost.
When a student has trouble paying attention in class, they often require information to be re-taught at home. Which turns the 45 minutes it would take to complete the tasks into an hour and a half of work or even two.
Consequences of difficulties in visual perception
Visual perception problems affect the tasks students perform in several ways:
1 - Since they have trouble copying the information on the board correctly, they spend a lot of time trying to decipher what they have written.
2 - By omitting words or lines when reading, they do not understand the information clearly and have to make frequent regressions in reading.
3 - When they do math problems, they do not tend to align their work correctly, they tend to lose the signs of subtraction and division; and this leads them to make careless mistakes.
Students with these difficulties tend to get tense when doing homework and this leads to arguments with their parents.
This fact is due to a process that begins at school and is determined by:
- Students are too shy to ask questions in class, which causes them to just get stuck.
- The student or parent gets angry; and so…
- Start a father / mother and son or daughter dispute that usually unleashes a real pitched battle.
What I recommend to my clients
For children who need too much time for daily homework, I often advise parents to:
1. Try to remain calm when helping your children do homework.
2. If you notice your child is stressed, give him a break for a couple of minutes.
3. Hydrate them before doing homework and while doing it.
4. When reading, use a bookmark or index finger to avoid getting lost when jumping from right to left with the line change.
5. If care is a significant problem, they should consider requesting a diagnosis of ADHD from a specialized psychopedagogue or the counselor at the center they attend.
If your child has a learning disability or attention problems, this will have a significant impact on their academic performance, and the student may need to have a Plan developed.
Individualized Education that includes curricular adaptations such as:
- A copy of the notes provided by the teacher or by another student.
- Have him sit next to the teacher to improve his attention.
- The review of homework by the teacher before taking them home.
- Daily contact with the teacher through the school agenda, which must be signed by the father or mother.
- An early warning system, where the teacher warns of any problem from the beginning of its appearance.
- The support of an interdisciplinary team in the educational center.
Knowing the rights of children in the educational center is something that all parents should know, especially parents of children with Specific Educational Support Needs. For this reason, it is one of the themes in which I insist on my service Become your child's therapist, where I provide strategies to parents so that they assume the role of therapist and take charge of the development of their son or daughter.
