WIN THE HOMEWORK WARS

Sure, it's important for your children to learn from their mistakes, but that doesn’t mean Dad should sit back and let his kids blow off their few commitments. Here are five expert strategies to make the nightly test of will with a child who refuses to do his or her homework less confrontational.

MAKE IT A TEAM EFFORT

Remind your child that you’re not the enemy, says Jeffrey Bernstein, the author of 10 Days to a Less Defiant Child. “Let him know you’re on his team,” he advises. Instead of pressure, give your child a running start: organise the material, help him do some problems, then cheerlead as necessary. Once a project is partially completed, it doesn’t seem so daunting.

PLAY TO THE CHILD’S STRENGTHS

If a child is paralysed by homework, Bernstein advises you to “encourage their identity as an achiever”. Instead of offering vague praise such as “You’re a smart kid”, he recommends drawing specific parallels to areas in which the child excels. For example, if your daughter is going for a brown belt in karate, praise her for sticking with it while other kids dropped out of the dojo . . . and encourage her to kick her homework in the head, too.

RESIST THE URGE TO PUNISH

Shouting, though often cathartic, doesn’t work. “Never pair something you want a child to do with anything aversive,” says Alan Kazdin, the author of The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child. “One of the worst things a teacher can do is have a student write something on the board 100 times.”

SPEAK THE RIGHT LANGUAGE

Kids relate to stories, not lectures. To win your children’s trust, Bernstein suggests sharing a story about how you disliked your year-six maths teacher, too. “Make disclosures about times in your life when you procrastinated or felt overwhelmed,” he says.

PRACTISE, PRACTISE, PRACTISE

“Ask yourself, ‘If I were a homework coach, how would I approach this?’,” says Dr Dan Kindlon, the author of Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age and a professor of child psychology at Harvard University. And Kazdin suggests starting out slow, settling for two-minute increments of work, then building from there. “You’re not going to get 45 minutes of homework tomorrow,” he says, “but next week, you will.”

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