Why this mum's rant about her son's homework is going viral.

“Homework is for the children.” A mother in Ireland condemned parents for doing their children’s homework in a Facebook rant, which quickly went viral but has since been taken down.

Sarah Thompson, a 37-year-old mother-of-three from County Armagh in Northern Ireland, has been taking her “brood” to the same primary school “for forever”, reports Belfast Live.

“You’d think I’d have learnt,” she told the camera.  She was referring to the string of school assignments in which children have to make something – for example, build their own houses – that keep coming around.

“You think I would have learnt to keep them to pass onto the next child, but I haven’t.”

After attending a presentation of her four-year-old son Noah’s class, where children showed off the houses they’d built using materials found around the home, Thompson posted a video to Facebook reminding parents: “Homework is for the children.”

She said Noah spent a week building his project from scratch – that he “was delighted with his work” – only to be shown up by houses that had clearly received some help.

“When Noah took his house project into school he was devastated because of a number of the other kids’ projects where like something from Grand Designs,” she said in the video, The Mirror reports.

“After seeing other homeworks he thought his was rubbish. It just broke my heart”

The other side of the argument, of course, is that increasing volumes of homework is a burden to children and taking away from family time.

A Young Australians Survey, released earlier this year, showed Australian school kids aged 10-13 are doing 40 more minutes a week of homework than they were 10 years ago, according to Herald Sun. On average, these ‘tweens’ are working four hours each week on school assignments.

In October last year, author and columnist wrote an article about the amount of homework stealing her children – in Years 10, eight, three, and Kindergarten – from time with the family.

“The demands of homework for our children are relentless, and I’m turning into the master nagger that I do not like as I push all the kids to their study tables with varying degrees of success,” she wrote for The Australian.

“It feels like our kids are working as hard as we do during the day, but they aren’t getting the essential, replenishing circuitbreaker time after school. What are we doing to them, especially at primary school level?”

As with most things, the answer around how much homework children should be given – and how much help parents might provide –
likely lies somewhere in the middle.

In the meantime, however,  Thompson’s video attracted more than 19,000 times and hundreds of comments.

What do you think about parents helping their kids with homework? Tell us in the comments below.