Managing Homework - The Plan

The major theme of artistic creation: identity.
                 - Francois Truffaut

The Homework Problem

During the many years I’ve counseled families about parenting and education, no other subject has arisen more frequently or caused more anguish than that of managing school homework.

Many children loath homework. Every evening and throughout the weekend they devise ingenious means by which to delay or refuse their duty. Most homework resisters accompany their resentment and rebelliousness with protracted whining, sullenness, sulking, and bursts of oceanic anger.

Many parents assume it’s their obligation to superintend their child’s schoolwork. Eventually, one parent – usually the mother – conceives she should sit every day at a desk or table and monitor, cajole, tutor, and coach her child’s work. Through the invidious processes of inertia, it somehow becomes her job to do her child’s job.

The daily struggle over homework preoccupies a great many families. The issue and its tensions become elephantine. Anxiety, pressure, quarrel, and resentment pervade the home, and become one of its dominant atmospheres.

Parents caught in this state of affairs commonly resort to a combination of threats and bribes. If you complete your homework, sweetie, I’ll reward you with this or with that. Usually with money, a material object, or a privilege. If you don’t do your homework, I’ll punish you. Frequently – normally – the punishment isn’t implemented. Or, if the child complains sufficiently, suborns the family’s evenings and weekends horribly enough, it’s rescinded.

As the strife over the child’s homework intensifies and grows chronic, spouses (or other adult caregivers) unwittingly appropriate the conflict, internalize it, and make it their own. Rather than interdicting their child’s intransigence, they find fault with one another. You’re the one who’s causing this trouble in our home life. You’re too easy on our child. Or: you’re much too hard on him. Why are you so strict? We should manage him this way. No, we should manage him that way. Is that so? Yes, it is. All right, if you’re so omniscient, you do it. You manage him. No, you do it.

Divorced spouses often convert The Homework Problem into a drama of accusatory pathos and self-inflating martyrdom. You spoil our daughter rotten when she’s with you. I’m the one who has to bring her back to earth when she returns to her real home. As usual, I have to be the villain when she’s with me.

Whatever our circumstances, almost all of us who confront the seemingly insoluble Homework Problem gradually allow our attitudes, rules, and courses of action to fluctuate into incoherence. We begin by defining our expectations and policies. Typically this takes the form: do your homework, or else. If our children resist us enough, we relax our regulations and make believe we’re establishing new ones. Worse, we disagree with one another, reverse course unilaterally, and react improvisationally. Worse yet, we criticize one another in our child’s hearing and argue virulently about how we should deal with our child’s factious attitudes and mutinous conduct.

The child learns that obdurate, angry, puling subversion wins gratifying rewards. Not only the overt reward of a desirable enticement – a bribe. Nor the enticement of actually avoiding the homework. Far more important for the child are three less explicit, utterly delusional, yet exceedingly potent incentives and compensations:

1. The usurpation of power in the family

2. The assumption of control over life’s major ontological conditions and governors: parents, school, and the situational disempowerment of youthfulness

3. The illusion of consequence and continuity: all energy and activity in my household, this miniature world, can be made to flow through my consciousness and cognitions

Seen in this context, the child who refuses to do homework is making a skillful artistic creation. At a young age, she’s forging an identity. At an early stage of awareness, he’s crafting a schematic of distinctiveness and seeming authority.

This illusory identity and its ostensible rewards may feel good initially. But these benefits contain a destabilizing correlative. For our daughters and sons know perfectly well that they’re children, they’re minors, and they mustn’t be allowed to coerce their family and command the external world. It frightens children when the adults who have given them life and who supervise their existence fail to impose clear, firm, loving boundaries on their experiments with insubordination and insurrection.

This should frighten them. It should terrify them. Because parents who refuse to control their children fundamentally are proclaiming they don’t care about them. They’re projecting the sense they don’t care what will happen to their child’s life.

How do frightened children react to this failure of parenting? Invariably they become angry, and they test. They push ever more radically against all adults’ limits. In essence, they declare: I will become more and more irate, I will behave more and more badly, until someone who has authority over me makes me stop it.

And what do children feel when their caregivers eventually do make them stop it, reestablish control, and require them to behave? They feel reassured. They feel grateful. They feel safe. They feel, correctly, that their caregivers care about them.

Is This Complicated?

The recalcitrant child exhibits much intelligence and expends vast energy in making The Homework Problem seem complicated. I’m tired. My work is too hard. I don’t understand the assignment. My teacher won’t help me. I lack confidence. None of my friends’ parents make them do their work. I have psychological troubles. I have learning differences. I have issues.

Some children – not many – do confront psychological challenges. Some – not many – do have genuine learning differences. You should work with your pediatrician and school to establish whether your child does face any special circumstances that inhibit his ability to pay attention, learn, and work. Authorize all tests that credible medical and pedagogic professionals consider reasonable and necessary.

If these tests reveal authentic problems, the practitioners with whom you’re partnering will help you develop courses of action that best can help your child manage her needs.

But if the tests demonstrate, as in most instances they will, that your child is perfectly well able to focus, learn, and carry out her assignments, you’ll have the comfort and power of knowing The Homework Problem isn’t complicated. It’s simple.

Here’s The Deal

So, what’s the true story here? What’s the deal?

The reality of the homework struggle is unequivocal, unvarying, inevitable, and ineluctable. Children must attend school. Virtually all schools impose homework. It doesn’t matter if homework is dull, degrading, or even deplorable. Children have to do it.

Children know this. Parents know it too. That’s the deal.

It’s also the case that every child has to be a child. Not an adult. Not a parent. Not a free agent. Not a power center. Not a provocateur. In law as well as in evolutionary biology, every child needs to be a child until at least until, in most economically developed nations, the age of 18.

Children know this. Parents know it too. That’s the deal.

There’s no alternative universe a child can concoct or a family can engender. In the real world, the only world we have, a child must be a child. School is compulsory. Homework is customary.

In due course, our daughters and sons must satisfy numerous other universal expectations – unless we intend to deed them an all-empowering trust fund that will subsidize even their most outlandish preferences and volitions.

That’s the deal.

Let’s repeat this baseline fact. We can’t repeat it often enough. The reality of The Homework Problem isn’t complicated.

Parents simply cannot permit their life, their child’s life, and their family’s life to become rendered miserable by, of all things, school assignments. Resistance behaviors that pollute the home, stress parents, and, ultimately, frighten the child have got to be corrected. In the homework struggle, as in all other issues concerning childrearing, parents must take power. This is an ugly phrase, but it makes a true account.

Division of Labor

Whatever else is true, it certainly isn’t the parents’ responsibility to do their child’s schoolwork. That’s the child’s job.

Parents have jobs. Parents have job requirements. So do children. Learning is every child’s profession. That’s all children do. They learn. Completing homework assignments are among this job’s most important job requirements.

In its essence, the homework contest is a rupture in natural order. In families afflicted by this rupture, something basic and elemental isn’t working. It needs to be fixed swiftly, cleanly, and permanently.

It needs to be fixed by the parents, because they’re in charge of the family. That’s one of the jobs of adulthood: taking charge.

The Plan

How do parents fix the homework mess? What steps do we need to take? In what order? In what spirit?

We must root the remedy of our repair work in our knowledge that the underlying issue is one of power. The basic question is: in your family, who’s in charge? You, or your child?

Inarguably, you are.

Since this is the case, you must actually and actively be in charge. You must take back your power. There’s no other way to fix The Homework Problem, help your child, and renew the indispensable, freely available joys of family life.

To do this imperative repair work, you should use what we’ll call The Plan. The Plan is a formula and pathway for regaining appropriate control over your family, your child’s welfare, and your own happiness.

As we’ll see momentarily, The Plan, although all-powerful and in our experience 100% effective, is simple. It’s a rather primitive command and control device.

What’s not simple is the matter of your conscious and unconscious will. You need really and truly to want corrective change. You need individually and together to commit to curative action. And you need to stay the course.

Step One: Embrace One Another

The first step is to establish, preserve, and protect profound agreement between the parents. Married or unmarried, both spouses (and all other adult caregivers), need to agree:

• the untenable homework situation must be corrected

• you’ll correct it by reassuming adult authority over your child, and exerting control together

• you won’t waver in your decision

How can you navigate this essential first step? How can you move from bewilderment, perhaps bitterness, and, for some spouses, as ostensibly unchangeable feeling of mutual antagonism to a necessary and far more fulfilling sense of shared love, trust, and resolve?

Ideally, by retreating together. Find a babysitter. Go on retreat, all by yourselves. Go somewhere you love. Somewhere lovely, isolated, and natural.

Stand back from your muddle and pain. Recognize the seemingly demonic Homework Problem and all its attendant torment as a mistake, for that’s what it is. Call it ancient history, for that’s what you’re going to make it become. Say goodbye to it.

Go to a mountain, a forest, or the sea. Sit on a tree trunk, a rock, a knoll. Take long, meandering walks. Visit with one another. Talk to each other. Give yourself to one another again, as once you did when you were younger.

You can do this. There is infinite power in it. You had that power once, when first you came to one another, loved one another, commenced your union, and birthed your family life. It will feel wonderful to rediscover one another and recover your love. It’s still there.

Even if you’ve separated or divorced, you can retreat together for the sake of your shared, sacred childrearing responsibility. If one or both of you have found love with someone new, try to have everyone who’s raising your child retreat with one another. See if you can find common ground. See if you can clear paths for parenting on which you can journey together, even though you now live separately. Do this for the sake of the child, and your own sakes.

When you discover one another anew – you can do this – vow that you’ll regain necessary loving control over your family. Vow that, working together, you’ll build better order, sanity, and wellbeing in your home. Vow that, working together, you’ll reestablish sustaining calm and life-affirming happiness in your family.

Don’t do this lightly. See it. Vision it. Vow solemnly. Bind and consecrate your decision. Render your commitment as an oath witnessed by the mountain, the forest, the sea.

If the circumstances of your relationship have become too fractured for this ideal, try your best, both of you, to accept the fact you’re in trouble with The Homework Problem, it’s a bloody shame, if there’s fault you share it, and – married, separated, or divorced – you want to work your way through your present suffering and sorrow to better shepherd the child you both love. See if, for this purpose, you can declare a general armistice with one another. See if, for this mission, you can proclaim a limited truce.

It may not be feasible for adult caregivers quickly or easily to achieve genuine agreement and deep unison. But it’s vitally important. It’s cardinal and constitutive. Never give up. Strive. Persist.

You must succeed, because it’s not possible for parents to take back control in their family until they accomplish absolute accord with one another. Until they achieve full loving partnership of spirit and intention.

This is the first step.

Ask for Help

We must acknowledge it may be impossible for spouses who have grown hopelessly embittered with one another to achieve the unity and resolve they need.

If it becomes evident you can’t take The First Step on your own, seek assistance. A wide array of resources are available in the faith community, the medical and psychology professions, your friendship circles, and elsewhere.

If you need help, seek it. Get it.

Do this openly, confidently, joyfully, so you can help yourselves and help your child.

Step Two: Embrace The Plan

The second step is to embrace The Plan.

What is The Plan?

The Plan is rooted in Five Truths. They’re not assumptions. They’re not conjectures. They’re not hypotheses. They’re truths. The Five Truths are:

1. You’re in charge. Your child isn’t.

2. Homework is routine. It’s got to be done.

3. Your child must do her homework every weekday and every weekend, entirely at her own initiative, without fuss and without bother.

4. Your home is your family’s haven. It can’t any longer be a battlefield for an absurd struggle about childhood metaphysics. It can’t any longer be a killing ground for a preposterous conflict about necessity.

5. You’re starting over. You’re imposing new expectations and firm but fair rules, which you’ll infallibly enforce.

That’s it. That’s The Plan.

We’ll speak in a moment about The Plan’s details, how you’ll introduce them to your child, how you’ll implement them, and how you’ll enforce them. For now, just focus on The Plan’s root truths. Believe in them. Embrace them.

Step Three: Partner With Your School

The third step is to connect your new attitudes and actions with your school’s.

Before you discuss The Plan with your child, request an appointment with your child’s teacher. If your child has more than one teacher, ask to meet with all of them simultaneously. Discuss openly the problem you’re facing at home. Explain you’ve decided to fix it, and ask for your school’s help.

How can the school help? Again, it’s simple. The school best can help by uniting with you to establish clear expectations for your child’s job – his schoolwork and his homework – and to administer predefined, unvarying consequences if your child fails to do his job.

If your child does her work in a timely and effective manner, she’ll be praised in her professional community and lauded with an appropriate mark or grade. She’ll be honored, respected, and successful in her milieu. She’ll enjoy that.

If your child fails to do his job, he’ll be censored in his workplace and penalized with a suitably poor score or rating. Presumably he’ll be additionally instructed or individually tutored by his teachers. In the worst case, if he refuses to improve his attitudes and performance for the remainder of the academic year, he’ll be held back from promotion to the next grade. He’ll hate that, and so will you. But this will be his choice, not yours. It will be his demotion, not the school’s. It will be his failure, not the world’s.

Your child needs to learn how to conform to reality, and he will. He can learn this the easy way, by accepting your teaching and rules, the school’s, and society’s. Or he can learn it the hard way. It’s up to him.

Explain to your child’s teachers that these are your purposes, and you’ll develop them at home. Ask the school to be similarly rigorous with your child in the workplace. You’ll parent. The teachers will teach.

Working together, you’ll be caring for your child. You’ll co-create what your child most needs: reality recognition, internal motivation, self-reliance, healthy independence, and the capacity for lifelong learning.

Don’t for even one moment feel ashamed, chagrined, or embarrassed. Nearly all the school’s families are facing similar challenges with The Homework Problem. Your child’s teachers will know this, will admire your resolve to correct the situation, and will want to help you.

If not – then not. You can’t control the school’s responses. You can only control your own, and your child’s. It will be helpful if you can partner with the school. But you don’t need its understanding and support. This is your child. You’re in charge.

Step Four: Implement The Plan

When you feel thoroughly ready – confident, calm, loving – arrange that you and all the other adult caregivers in your family will speak with your child one evening after dinner at your dining table. When your family has finished eating:

• Clear the dishes.

• Set a savory alluring dessert on your table, but don’t yet serve it.

• Light several candles. Tall tapers, lanterns, floaters, tiny vespers. However many candles you like. Let them glow.

• Taking turns, talk with your child in the most open, honest, affectionate, but insistent terms.

In your conversation, follow this sequence:

1. Begin by saying you’ve come together this evening to solve The Homework Problem.

2. Summarize the tumult in your household, and describe its cost for you, your child, and your family’s harmony

3. Explain once, simply and clearly, that learning is your child’s profession, school is his job, and homework is his job requirement.

4. Announce that, from tomorrow onward, your child must do her homework every single day, by herself, without struggle, and without disturbance. [In the next Chapter, we’ll outline your child’s exact Job Description and your expectations for its fulfillment.]

5. Announce you’re imposing an “Or Else” Regimen to enforce this rule, and name the Or Else’s upon which all the adults in your family have agreed. [We’ll describe The Plan’s ‘Or Else’ Regimen shortly.]

6. State once that you love your child, and you love peace and tranquility in your home, so you greatly prefer not to impose any of the Or Else’s. But you will if you have to.

7. Say once that all the experience and outcome choices here are entirely the child’s. However, the family’s expectations, rules, and power are entirely yours.

8. Say once that you realize this is a big change. However, it’s necessary and you’re committed to it forever. There will be no further discussions about it, and there will be no negotiations about it. The changes will begin tomorrow, and they’ll never go away.

9. Ask once if your child has any questions. The questions can’t be negotiations in disguise. They can only be queries about facts. They can only be clarifications about genuine confusions.

10. Assure your child you believe in her, you love her dearly, and you always will do everything in your power to support her, assist her growth, and enable her happiness. It’s primarily for these reasons you’re making these changes.

That’s it. Nothing more need be said on this subject. Serve dessert, and enjoy one another’s company in the candlelight.

Your Child’s Job Description

This is the Job Description that The Plan requires for your child:

• When your child comes home from school each afternoon, she’ll be given x-amount of time to decompress from the school day, re-immerse in the family, snack, relax, and renew. One hour should be about right.

• Then your child, entirely on her own, will complete her homework during x-amount of time before dinner.

• If more time is needed, she’ll work after dinner for x-amount of time before bed.

• If weekend time is needed, she’ll organize and utilize it accordingly. She’ll do this on her own, without your prompting or policing.

• You’ll lovingly welcome the opportunity to be a resource when your child is working on HIS school assignments. You’ll reply to specific questions. You’ll respond to respectful and clear requests for advice, suggestions for research resources, practice quizzing, etc.

• Under no circumstances will you do your child’s homework for him. And in no instance will you monitor him while he does it.

This is your child’s Job Description. It’s simple, clear, factual, necessary, and almost exactly like every other child’s job description in his country and in every other economically developed community.

Your Job Description

Your Job Description is simple, too:

• You won’t tolerate any struggle from your child about your new rules. There will be no more confrontations about The Homework Problem, because you won’t permit them.

• If your child chooses to seek conflict about your rules, you won’t react in any discomforted, codependent way. Instead, you calmly and automatically will implement The Plan’s “Or Else” Regimen.

The “Or Else” Regimen

The parents I counsel always ask me: What if my child does this? What if my child does that?

Let’s consider some What If’s. Then we’ll develop several specific mechanisms by which you’ll handle all possible testing and rebellion behaviors. This will be your Or Else Regimen: a set of fair, lucid, measured, exponentially more severe consequences you’ll impose upon your child whenever necessary to insist your rules are followed and to ensure there is rightful order in your household.

The Or Else Regimen begins with the adult walk-away. If your child ever again cries, shouts, or tantrums about his homework – just walk away. Say nothing. Not one word. Go to one of YOUR rooms. Shut the door.

Go together, mother and father. If your spouse is away, go on your own.

If your household is managed by other caregivers, be sure they take power together, implement it together, and remain (at least on the surface!) unruffled. They, too, should just walk away. If they don’t have a bedroom or a den in your home, let them choose a space they like, and let them ban the tantrum child from it.

After you’ve walked away, have nothing further to do with your child’s nonsensical search for struggle and strife. Just look after yourself. Do something pleasant. Read a book. Sketch. Paint. Sculpt. Relax. Your child knows the rules. He must obey them without disrupting your peace of mind. He must do his professional work, his job, without disturbing your harmony of spirit.

But – what if? What if the child won’t give up the struggle and strife? What if he rants and raves for hours? All night long?

He won’t. He’ll get tired. It may take him a while, perhaps a long while, to learn you mean it. In time he’ll wear out. Particularly if every adult in his life ignores his combat strategy, and rather than responding to it radiates total sanguine calm.

The model here is our memory of the child as an infant. Remember how he wailed in his crib whenever you put him down to rest. He cried and cried, demanding to be picked up. At some point, you stopped allowing that. Your infant cried a bit longer, but finally he abandoned his demanding behavior. Probably he abandoned it quite quickly. When good sense and order became established, he felt relieved and so did you. In due course, your infant accepted the need for crib time, nap time, and sleep time. Ultimately he looked forward to these times, and he built his life routines around them.

Let’s raise the question again. What if your corrective walk-away isn’t enough? What if your child tests you not for moments or minutes but for hours and hours, aggressively, belligerently, even crazily?

This may well happen. Perhaps we can’t just say to our children, out of the blue: learning is your profession, school is your workplace, and it’s up to you to do your work on your own.

We unwittingly may have taught our children for many months, maybe years, that in fact they CAN resist our authority. Without consciously wanting to, we may have rewarded them richly for resisting our expectations and rejecting our rules, the school’s rules, and the world’s rules. Why should your child forsake now the mechanisms that have worked so well for her for so long?

Why? Because you’ll make her.

How Far Can I Go?

What if your child still won’t adhere to the new order in your family? What if your daughter still refuses to do her work on her own? What if your son still won’t behave himself?

Well, what would happen to you if you refused to do your jobs? How would the authorities in your life react? What would you lose?

You’d lose your employ, yes? You’d lose some or all of your securities, compensations, and emoluments, right? Of course you would, and rapidly too.

That’s exactly what should happen to your daughter if she won’t do her job. It’s what should happen to your son if he won’t behave himself. They should lose some or all of their securities, compensations, and emoluments. How many and for how long can be up to them.

Begin with meals. Why should you serve dinner to your daughter if she refuses to do her afternoon or weekend homework? If she rejects her duties, tell her she can’t have her evening meal with the family. Particularly if she makes an uproar, and causes her family unnecessary emotional upheaval. If she won’t do her job, if she won’t behave herself, let her eat her meals alone each evening in the basement or in the garage. Not in her room. Her room is for homework, not meals.

What if this Or Else doesn’t succeed?

Go further. Go as far as you have to go.

If your child still won’t do her job, if she continues to cause daily turbulence in your home, why should she have access to YOUR food at all? If the Homework Problem continues for more than one week, let her go without the food you provide and the meals you cook. She can be allowed one glass of milk before she goes to sleep, and one in the morning before she goes to school – if she pours the milk herself, and if she washes the glass when she’s done. She won’t starve. She really won’t.

If this doesn’t work? Go further.

Why should your child have video games, toys, or access to a computer if he continues to dispute the simple necessity of being a student, won’t do his schoolwork, behaves rudely to you about his obligations, and further disrupts his family’s harmony?

Don’t let him. Both parents (and all other adult caregivers), working together, should take charge. Walk together into your son’s room. Hold hands. Let him see how unified and unambiguous you are. Pile several empty cardboard cartons in his room. Drop a roll of movers’ tape on the floor. Order him pack up some or all of his favorite belongings. Especially his telephone, his computer, his iPod, and his electronic games. Plus his earphones. Make him seal the cartons. Tell him to carry them into the basement or garage.

The first thing he’ll do, of course, is shriek with incredulity and rage: “When can I have them back?”

You should reply, calmly, pleasantly: “I have no idea. You created your problem. You figure out its solution.” End the discussion. Walk away.

Deep down, your child knows perfectly well how he can solve his problem. Or he doesn’t, and he’ll have to learn how. This will take as long as it takes. It’s HIS problem. He should be able to solve it in a short period of time.

However long it takes him, you’ll have established that you’re in control, and you’re immune to all his sabotage, blackmail, and fit of temper strategies. You’ll have constructed The Plan’s essential foundation. You’ll be able to build on this firmament forevermore.

How Far, Really, Can I Go?

You’ve reasserted authority in your household. You’ve declared your requirements for your child’s behavior. You’ve demonstrated that refusal to fulfill your expectations brings, without discussion or negotiation, instantaneous, lasting, and increasingly awful consequences. Consequences for the recalcitrant child – not for you, and not for the family.

You can increase these consequences to any extent you determine is needed. The Plan is flexible. Take whatever measures you believe are right for your child and comfortable for you. There are two caveats, though:

1. Don’t be subtle with your Or Else’s. Don’t be indirect. Children who are testing adult authority need absolute clarity.

2. Don’t let up. Don’t back down. You have to mean it. And you have to show you mean it.

Let it be up to your daughter to decide, of her own free will, when she’d like to behave herself. Let it be up to your son to decide when he’ll motivate himself, do his jobs, and act appropriately at his school and in your house.

During the interim, the adults in the family should do everything in your ability to feel calm, resolved, confident, and happy. If you can’t actually feel these strengths, affect them. Make it appear as though you feel them.

Enjoy one another. Enjoy your home. Enjoy your lives. In time – most likely, a rather short time – your child will choose to behave herself. Your child will conclude he has no other choice but to embrace the constructive changes you’re demanding.

Illustration

How far can you go?

Among all the parents I’ve coached, the couple who have felt the most committed to The Plan went very far. One evening they hurled their eighth-grade son’s bedding out his bedroom window, onto their backyard lawn. They told him he’d forfeited his right to live, work, play, and sleep in the bedroom they provide for him. With his bedding he could build a tent. Or not, as he pleased. No campfires were allowed in their town, so he’d need to provision himself for light and heat. He’d need to do his homework by twilight, by starlight, or wake himself up early and do it in the dawn. He was welcome to return to his place in their home whenever he’d like to do his job properly every day, and behave himself appropriately.

He lasted two nights. Surprising stamina. Tough kid. Then he made a wise and wonderful choice. At 5:30 on the third evening, he came indoors, hugged his parents, said he’d been an obnoxious jerk, and asked what was for dinner?

From time to time during the ensuing months, he backslid. He swiftly regretted and repaired every lapse, because The Or Else Regimen instantly rained down upon him.

In later years, the young man returned from his university studies to visit with me. I expected him to be accusatory, maybe livid. To my surprise, he was extraordinarily sweet, warm, and grateful. We visited for more than an hour. As we were exchanging manly goodbye handshakes, he said: “I was so scared when I was out of control. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. I didn’t know what was going to happen to my life.”

Long and successful experience with The Plan has taught me, and has taught all the parents I assist: Do whatever you need to do to take charge of your family. Do whatever you need to do to establish and perpetuate your loving authority. There are no limits to your love, and no limits to your power. Go as far as your child decides you have to go.

One day, your child will thank you for doing this. She may not say so for years, but from the outset she’ll feel glad you rescued her. She’ll feel grateful you drew her back from the precipices of peril.

Positive Reinforcements

It’s wearying to make the family revolve overmuch around an Or Else Regimen. Positive reinforcements are more pleasurable for you, healthier for your family, and certain to help stimulate the earliest possible end to the struggle environment.

Here are some examples of highly beneficial and enjoyable family activities that can supplement the Or Else Regimen with positive stimuli.

Introduce a daily pre-dinner activity everyone in your family will relish. A 30-minute family bicycle ride. A short hike in a beautiful place. A family swim in summer. Snowshoeing in winter. Gather leaves in autumn, and leap in them together.

Organize a post-dinner activity everyone will love. Assemble an after-dinner family ice cream buffet, or go out for a cone. Buy a telescope. Develop an evening stargazing routine. Buy a trampoline, and take turns jumping on it together after dinner. Work off those ice cream calories.

Develop even more consequential family fête opportunities for weekends. Choose a riveting film to watch together in a cinema. Afterward, share a family dinner in a restaurant you love and talk together about the film’s story, themes, characters, and historical backgrounds. Plan exciting follow-ups. For example, a family trip to the film’s settings; or, if they’re too far from your home, visits to places of similar importance and interest that you can reach by car. Or rent an RV, and camp along your route. Wander along bucolic side roads.

Here’s the deal, though. Only those family members who’ve cheerfully fulfilled their daily jobs get to participate in the family’s entertainments and celebrations.

Don’t let the question of eligibility for festival and fun become an issue for quarrels. Don’t be dragooned into becoming the arbiter. Keep it simple. Everyone who’s qualified herself for the family’s wholesome fun-filled activities can take part in them. Anyone who hasn’t done his jobs can’t take part. He needs to stay home, and do the work he failed to do when he could and should have done it.

Full stop. No discussions. No disputes.

If your child hasn’t done his jobs and is too young to be left home alone, the adult caregivers can take turns as the protector who remains home with him. Be sure, though, that while the child is doing HIS work, the adult protector goes to an adult space, stays there, and finds adult enjoyments.

Your child soon will figure out he should have done his homework when he came home from school. Your child soon will decide on her own that she really and truly must do her jobs, everyday, just like you, just like me, just like everyone in the whole world.

Positive reinforcements aren’t bribes. They’re authentically available pleasures fully and freely attainable to everyone who embraces the experience of living in a loving family. They’re motivators: affirmations of your principles, and fulfillments of your teaching.

Must We Do This On Our Own?

It truly is difficult to intervene with established family patterns. It feels horrible and lonely to be in conflict with your children. It feels frightening too, even when you know you’re right. Even when you know you must act.

The Plan is hard work. It’s challenging to do it utterly on your own. So, try to find allies. Partner with close friends who also are contending with The Homework Problem. It well may be that you can work in concert with many other families who share your faiths, interests, and devotions. Look in faith-based groups, PTA groups, social action groups, workplace associations, artistic troupes. Wherever you think you’re likely to find other concerned and committed parents.

You can accomplish The Plan’s crucial work for your family on your own. But if you can find trustworthy steadfast partners, do so! Help one another. Talk together. Strategize. Debrief one another. Give each other feedback. Reassure and renew one another. If you want to, pool your resources and hire a coach.

The Alternatives?

The Plan’s philosophies and methods may seem cold, uncaring, even cruel. They’re the opposite. These beliefs and practices are heartfelt, loving, and redemptive. They provide exactly what an out-of-control child most wants and needs.

I don’t believe there are any other viable choices. The Plan works, and other approaches don’t. Benign neglect, formless hope, ersatz tenderness, feckless imploring, infuriated imprecation, guilt-ridden babying, hyperactive micromanaging, pretended punishing, counterproductive forgiving – none of these common parenting tactics succeed. Right? You’ve tried them all, and they just don’t work.

Is the status quo an option? Before answering Yes or No, ask yourself these questions.

What will become of your family if The Homework Problem remains unchecked? What will happen if you give it permission to intensify, broaden, and deepen? What will become of your home life if every afternoon, evening, and weekend becomes ever more contaminated by a pointless struggle for control between you and your child? How will constructive change ever occur, unless you make it occur?

Indeed, what is your plan for your child? If you allow The Homework Problem to fester indefinitely, how will your child proceed through her school grades? Enter university? Identify a career, qualify for it, excel in it? Lead a family of her own one day?

Even more to the point, what is your child’s plan for herself? Does your daughter believe she can succeed in school if she carries on like a madwoman? Does your son suppose that when he becomes 16 or 18 or 22 he can become employed in the working world as – what? An unqualified, undisciplined, arrogant, rude, self-financed separatist?

The years will pass by rapidly. Surely you don’t want your family life, the remainder of your child’s youth, and your child’s entire future to be made a mess because of something so trivial yet unavoidable as homework?

The Plan will help you. It’s hard work, but it will save your child and it will save your family.

While You’re At It

Parents frequently ask me: Can we make The Plan more comprehensively corrective? Can we add attitude requirements? For example, courtesy and grace requirements? Reasonable expectations about cheerful participation in household jobs? Limits to television time? Limits to Facebook use? Limits on clothing abuses and cosmetics? Limits on friendships with kids we distrust? Sensible bedtimes? Getting up on time in the morning?

Sure you can. These issues are all related.

Children constantly tell me they desperately want boundaries. They seek them by acting out – what we’ve called “testing.” You should establish all the limits for your children you consider desirable and loving. You may as well do this all at once while you’re solving The Homework Problem. You may as well pay the price only once!

The message here is consistent, and it’s consistently reassuring. Working together in an environment of good order with you fully in charge, you and your children can cure every problem you face and achieve all the harmony and happiness you desire for your family.

This is what the universe wants. This is why all the peoples who ever have lived always have known that nature’s way is to give parents the authority over children that’s commensurate with most adults’ greater age, maturity, and experience.

Act Now

It’s natural to feel powerless when you and your loved ones are in trouble. Reject that feeling. Reject panic. Renounce paralysis. Refuse to wallow. Stop waffling. Stop wallowing. Stop wringing your hands with woe. Quit all that. Jettison it. Junk it.

Take redemptive action. Your child is begging you to stop his nonsense. Your family needs you to stop it. Do it. Do it quickly.

Act confidently. Act decisively. Act now. Use what we call the Plan, or develop another. Do what you need to do. Destroy this homework mess.

You have all the power. The mess has none, unless you give it yours. The mess owns nothing but malignancy and void, unless you give it your will, your strength, your brilliance.

Fix the mess. Have done with it. Terminate this unnatural Homework Problem. It’s destructive, and it’s stupid. Put it behind you. Go forward.

Be an artist of love, not struggle. Make your family’s artistic creation, its identity, become not conflict but the productive joy you and your beloved children are worthy of and ought to have.