Getting Your Kids to do Their Homework

I have a new e-book out today:  99 Ways to Get Your Kids to do Their Homework (and Not Hate It):  Updated and Revised.  It’s available on Amazon, and should be available soon on all of the other e-book sites, like Barnes and Noble and Apple.  Here is the description of it:

Is homework ruining your family life?  Do you spend hours every day worrying about how your children (and you) will ever get through the piles of homework that schools are sending home now?   There are no magic bullets and no easy answers, but my commonsense advice will make the whole process easier.  

Since the main goal must be that children become independent about managing homework, this book is full of suggestions about helping that to happen.  Chapters deal with issues from preschool through high school.  There is also a section on gifted children.

Included is a greatly expanded Appendix, with interviews with my high school students about their homework experiences.  This is my favorite part of the book.  I interview students who have been very competent about completing homework, as well as students who have rebelled, and done very little.  There are interviews with gifted students, and interviews with students needing special ed. services.   

Here is a sampling:

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"Junior year started off about the same as other years.  I was playing football, but then I got in trouble and I got kicked off the team.  That started a downward spiral.  Everyone was disappointed and I was more than everyone.   It happened quickly.  I just stopped caring, totally.  I stopped doing assignments."

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"I remember my dad read to me as a child, in English and Chinese, every night.  I shared a room with my sister, and one night I was working my way through this book and he was helping me, and my sister said, “Can you stop?  I want to go to sleep.”  And he said, “No, this is important. “There was always the expectation that the homework needs to be done.  "

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"So at one point, when my older sister was in 9th grade, I was in 6th grade, and my younger sister was in 3rd grade, my parents made a designated “homework time. . . So we would all sit down at the kitchen table, from 7-8:30 or so.  Doing this never improved my grades and never me focus better.  It just made me annoyed with my parents for being too controlling."