I can't do my son's homework. I might fail!

When you send your child to school there’s a lot of things you have to deal with, but the one thing that parents are constantly debating is homework. Should kids have to do it? Should it be scrapped altogether? And, if we’re being honest, should parents just do it for the child to save a hell of a lot of time and hassle?

About Parenting reported that, in a recent survey of US parents, 43% of parents admitted to doing their children’s homework.

I won’t lie, it happens a lot actually. A tonne of my friends say things like:

“Urgh, I just wrote it so he had something to hand in,” or

“Oh we were flat chat so I did her assignment for her and just hoped for the best.”

To be honest, I admire them.

In About Parenting's report teachers indicated that one of the reasons parents do their child's homework was to obtain a better grade. That, I cannot understand.

There is no way I would do my son's homework. Why? Because I am petrified I'd fail.

My son is only in year two, but he is already doing long division and complicated maths sums. While I may have done advanced maths in my own HSC, my brain decided it was much more useful to remember important things like Taylor Swift lyrics and movie quotes than it was to remember like trigonometry.

I am instantly reaching for a calculator to complete sums he can do in his head in an instant. If anything me doing his homework would lower his grade, not improve it.

You know that logic puzzle that was going around the internet last week? Yeh, he solved it in three seconds. THREE SECONDS. He's seven. I stared at it for at least five minutes because I clicked. He looked at it, flipped my phone around and said, "mum the picture's upside down it's 87."

Sigh. He's clearly smarter than I am, why would I even bother doing his homework?

I always wonder, when I hear about parents doing their children's homework, if the teacher just laughs at them. They are trained professionals. Surely they know the difference between a child's ideas and a parents.

The only thing I could actually get away with is faking the messy handwriting that kids have. Though, mine is so bad my son would probably get in trouble for not writing in his usual neat style.

Maybe we should take on some of these tips about helping our kids with homework instead of actually doing their homework. Post continues after video:

Either way, the statistics reported on my About Parenting are a little scary regardless. In some parts of the USA up to 87% of parents were doing their child's homework. That's insane. How are children going to learn anything if their parents are doing their homework for them?

Some parents said a lack of time was the reason they did their kid's homework. But even in that scenario I think it's easier, and better, to spend the short amount of time you have writing a note to the teacher and explaining the situation rather than actually attempting to complete the homework.

Of course we all learnt about Australian history and what planets are in the universe when we were at school but the finer details that we may have learnt back in school are long gone now. Besides, the teacher wants to know whether their students are taking in the content not whether the students' parents are history buffs.

Now if only my sons had an exam on Taylor Swift songs, I'd ace it...

Have you done your child's homework? Would you consider doing it if you were stuck for time or thought they might fail?

Want more? Try these:

Why you should refuse to let your kids do homework.

Some kids are really good at doing their homework. Not.