The Home Learning / Homework and the Evening

Sit with them, but resist the urge to supervise

There is a large difference between being present and being in charge.

A parent who sits down at the table with a book, a laptop, a pile of bills or a cup of tea is doing something genuinely useful. Work is easier to start when somebody else is also working, and the child gets the reassurance of company without the pressure of an audience. A parent who sits down and watches the page is doing something different, and children feel the difference immediately. Watching produces commentary, commentary produces correction, and correction at the wrong moment stops the child's own thinking dead. The best evenings tend to be quiet ones where two people are busy at the same table.

Company also makes questions possible. A child who is being observed will often not ask, because asking confirms that they are struggling in front of someone who is already looking. A child sitting beside a parent who is absorbed in something else will ask, because the question is casual and costs them nothing. Those questions are the whole point. They are the moments where a parent can be genuinely useful, and they arrive far more often in a relaxed room than in a monitored one. It is worth waiting for them rather than manufacturing them, because a question that a child has actually formed is one they are ready to hear the answer to.

This is also the kindest arrangement for the parent. Watching another person work is boring and it makes small problems feel urgent. Having your own thing to do means the child's pauses, doodles, staring out of the window and slow starts pass by without provoking anything. A great deal of what looks like time wasting is thinking, and a parent with something else to occupy them is far less likely to interrupt it. There is also something quietly modelled in it. A child who regularly sees an adult read, plan, do paperwork or work through something difficult picks up an idea about what grown up life involves, and it is a more persuasive idea than anything said out loud at the same table.