Band-Aid vs. Cure: Why doesn’t Johnny want to do math homework?

When a child comes home with a bad math grade, the first two assumptions that a parent makes is that the child is either lazy or "just doesn't get it". From my experience with individual work with numerous of students with all abilities and work habits, 95% of the time the child is neither "lazy" nor "dumb". Overall there are three major reasons why kids don't do math, and only one of them has to do with "aptitude" and even in this case it has to do with strength of math foundation, quality of test-taking and study skills, not "intelligence". Understanding the cause of your child’s seeming lack of progress in math is critical to giving him/her the right antidote.  What you don’t want to do is nag Johnny to do his math homework – after all what good is a Band-Aid if a broken arm is what is causing Johnny his agonizing pain?  The three reasons are:

¨       Lack of math confidence.  Johnny is locked in a vicious self-defeating cycle of having poor math foundation, which in turn makes understanding new material impossible and when inadequate skills in taking tests and in learning are added, the child’s math fear takes over.  Who among us has not shied away from our worst fear?  Imagine, would you do with your speech homework if your worst nightmare is standing in front of a room-full of strangers telling them how you dread to giving a speech!?

¨       Lack of perceived importance.  If Johnny is way out of the norm curve when it comes to connecting with peers, reading your emotions or if he is being overtly generous in his time and energy in helping out mankind in general, you might have a very sensitive and socially intelligent child.  For those children, being able to keep that connection with the outside world is of the supreme importance.  Unless you paved the road to math early (and often) and demonstrated the importance of math into his consciousness early on, Johnny might be equating math with that old piano practice he dropped in 3rd grade or that Tae Kwon Do lesson back in 1st grade.  Come to think of it, if having a shiny new car is not important, would you wax it every other day in our hot desert sun!?

¨       Lack of adequate communication tools.  Some kids are born stronger willed than others and depending on the kind of communication tools Johnny picked up from his natural environment, he may not have enough tools to say ‘I don’t agree with you on topic #1’ whatever that topic #1 is.  For some, it’s ‘you favor my brother more’, and for some it’s ‘I need more attention’ and still for others it might be ‘I’m lost and scared’.  Whatever that topic #1 is, the stress of not being able to communicate it with you, his primary care provider, is enough for Johnny to pick the nearest tool he’s got: math homework.  Kids intuitively understand that school is important for parents, and there is really not a thing we can do if Johnny doesn’t do his homework.  Sure, we can take his internet away, his cell phone away, his biking privilege away, his TV away– when Johnny has nothing left, then what!?  They say that the richest man is the one who has nothing.  Think about it, if we have no kids, no job, no money, no obligations, who can possibly do what to us?  So if not doing homework is all Johnny has left in his tool box to tell you what he could not find any other way to tell you, why would he go do homework? 

I know, I know. If you read this article this far, you probably are thinking, what?  Do you mean that its okay Johnny does not do his homework?  No, to the contrary, I’m saying that unless you know, understand and appreciate Johnny’s reasons (however silly they are to you) for not wanting to do him homework, you’ve got no chance to give him the nutrition he needs to nurture his mind.   We care about Johnny’s homework because we’ve learned what can happen when homework is not done, we know how it can lead to loss of interest in school, we know how that it can threaten his future – but unless we can hear Johnny first, he does not have the room to hear us!!    The ironic thing is that Johnny does need our help and we are right about the importance of homework.

So, the greatest challenge for any parent, I believe, is not love our children.  I mean, really, who among us would hesitate to jump in front of a moving train to save our children?  We nag on Johnny about his homework because we care, because we love him and we worry for him.  Yet, none of our love would make an iota’s difference if we can’t hear him reasoning in his own world.  How do I get into his world, you ask.  The answer is almost ridiculously simple.  So simple that it is hard for us adults to do.

How we get into Johnny’s world is this: we appreciate him.  That’s right, we appreciate him.  We appreciate his silliness, his stubbornness, his misshapes, his mistakes.  The whole nine yards.  We appreciate him, and in appreciating him, we empty his ‘buckets’, so he can hear the importance of homework, the worry we have about him, the love we have for him.   In St. Francis’s words, “in giving we receive.”

In giving Johnny our appreciation, we receive his permission to be in his world.  Only then can we hope to make the kind contribution that each one of us as a caring parent is desperately trying to make.  Appreciating Johnny cures Johnny’s homework.

 Now, it’s up to us to do the hard part: appreciate all that is Johnny, all the time.