Now before you start looking for pitch forks and torches, let me explain: this is not my personal belief but rather something I hear from my clients on a regular basis. At Breakthroughs in Learning we work with children and adults who struggle to learn, so it’s little surprise that homework is not usually an area of celebration for them. However, my clients aren’t the only ones.  I hear from parents fairly frequently that their children are constantly trying to dodge homework. This marks the start of a series of blogs looking at some of the reasons your children or students may be avoiding homework.

Sometimes children don’t seem to understand the priority that homework should take in their life. Often, parents can see into the future and predict the effects of their child’s current behaviour and the consequences it can have for the future. This can be a lack of judgement skills and it may show up in other areas as well. Judgement skills are the brain’s ability to make good decisions, those involving “right and wrong” type choices. This also affects their ability to predict consequences. For instance skipping to-nights math homework because they don’t really understand it. They fail to realize that tomorrows math lesson is based on today’s, and if they don’t take the time to make sure they understand today’s lesson, there could be a hole in their future math studies for quite some time to come.

Now perhaps I should come clean. To a certain extent, if I am entirely honest…I understand that homework can occasionally seem like an itzy bitzy waste of time. That, however, is a side effect of a large scale educational system. Can you imagine individualizing homework every night for every child in the class? Impossible, so everyone gets the same homework (generally speaking) whether or not they understood the lesson. However, this provides the opportunity to develop healthy study skills and a strong work ethic. On the other extreme, I’ve talked to parents who spend 3-6 hours a night with their child in tears trying to finish their homework. Fortunately these are the exception, and not the rule.

If your child CAN do their homework but still avoids it, it may just be a judgement skill issue. Poor judgement skills will show up in other areas of life as well. Do you find yourself asking your child “Why would you do that?!” The situation appears obvious to you that it was a poor choice and that your child, at that age, should automatically recognize that. The child often responds with a blank look or is unable to describe why they made that decision. These types of impulsive decisions can even pose safety risks, when riding a bike, crossing the street or just playing in the back yard.

Other warning signs that judgement skills need development include:

• the letter  “b” may be mistaken for “d”
• the student may appear immature for their age
• the student makes poor behaviour choices, or poor judgements around friends

Weak judgement skills are perhaps one of the most common problems that we see in our clients at Breakthroughs in Learning. Consequently, it represents the largest proportion of our Brain Booster series. These books specifically target and develop the ability to make better judgements and decisions, to be more age appropriate in behaviour and choices, and to improve reading and spelling skills. If your children or students are frequently behaving in ways that make you suspect their judgement skills need to be strengthened and developed, I highly encourage you to act now, because waiting would be poor judgement.

Does your child or student avoid their homework? Leave us a comment. We’d love to hear about it!

About the Author

From an early age Matthew loved to talk, and now he gets paid to do just that.

Having grown up with Learning Disabilities and overcome them, Breakthroughs is an opportunity for him to give back. Now Matthew is an Educational Therapist with over 20,000 hours of experience working with children and adults with learning challenges.

When not in the office Matthew can be found seeking adventure with his wife and children, preferably on a mountain or in a kayak.

Connect With Me

Post Comment