The Home Learning / Helping Without Taking Over

Explaining and doing are not the same favour

The line between the two is easy to cross and hard to see from the inside.

Every parent who has ever leaned over a page has felt the pull. The child is stuck, the answer is obvious to an adult, the evening is long, and it would take four seconds to say it. Saying it feels like helping. It removes the distress in front of you, the page moves on, and everybody gets to go to bed. The trouble is that the child has learned nothing about the problem, and has learned something rather unfortunate about themselves: that when it gets hard, somebody else does it. That lesson is absorbed quietly and repeated often, and it is much more durable than the answer that was handed over.

Explaining looks different in practice. It works backwards from what the child already knows rather than forwards from what you know. Where did it stop making sense? Show me the last bit you were sure about. What is the question actually asking you to find? Read that line to me again. These are all ways of returning the problem to the child in a smaller, more manageable form. The child still does the work. You have only made the work possible, which is the most a parent can usefully do.

It also helps to notice which of you is holding the pencil, because that is the honest test. If the pencil has migrated to the adult, the work has migrated too, whatever the conversation sounds like. Keep your hands off the page. Point with a finger, or ask the child to point. It seems trivial. It is not: the physical act of writing the answer is where a surprising amount of the thinking happens, and a child who is never allowed to do it does not get the practice. The same applies to typing, to the calculator and to the ruler. Whoever operates the tool is doing the task, and a parent who takes it over has quietly moved from helping to finishing.