What the Research Actually Says About Parental Involvement In Homework

If you’ve had kids in school, you probably know this scene well:

Dinner is finished and everyone is feeling good about life. It’s 6:30 and everyone is finally regulated. And then the battle begins: homework.

It only takes 10 minutes and someone is crying - it may actually be you and not the kids. The teacher’s message said the worksheet should take 15 minutes, but it’s now 7:30 and you don’t know what has happened for the past hour, but somehow you are still on that 15 minute worksheet. And you’re standing in the kitchen wondering if every home goes through this or if you are the only parent who has to fight about homework every night.

School Mental Health published a study this year that looked at the parenting styles about homework of 226 families with kiddos aged 10-14.

Their conclusion was that autonomy-supportive parenting — helping without controlling — created homes that were:

• More effective with time management

• Demonstrating greater resilience in actually getting homework done

• Struggling with less off-task behaviors during homework sessions

The key seems to be that the parent’s self-regulatory skills, which facilitated the relationship between what parent support looked like and homework completion. In other words, the homework completion wasn’t because of parent’s tutoring the actual content on the page, but that it was the approach these parents took with their kids that encouraged the kid’s own ability to complete the assignments.

• Giving kids more choice like “Are you going to start with reading or math first?”

• Acknowledging the difficulty like saying “That worksheet does look tough. How are you going to approach it?”

• Being near but not hovering- be in the room, but doing your own work.

• Avoiding control by using suggestions and leading questions rather than just doing it yourself

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These things may be what most parents end up doing because the homework eventually gets completed.

• Standing over them

• Constantly saying things like “ok, now do the next one.”

• Correcting mistakes immediately as they are going from problem to problem or question by question.

• Threatening consequences like loss of screen time

• Doing the work for them because you are just over it

This study proves what you probably already know: control tactics just make it worse. But it also shows that the other option of “walk away and hope” is also not the way to go.

If your child is in elementary school: You do not need to understand common core math or remember how to do decimals without a calculator. You role when it comes to homework is to simply be there and provide executive function supports as necessary - more on that tomorrow.

If your child is in middle or high school: This is very kid dependant and you know them best. If you had established the support role while they were in elementary school then you should be able to walk further and further away as they move from grade to grade.

Tomorrow’s blog will give you a homework framework- just like I gave you a morning and afterschool framework. This framework will tell you what to say, when to step in, when to step back, and exactly what to request in an IEP meeting if homework is doing more harm than good.

The more difficult transition is to figure out how and when to step back. It becomes more problematic if your child is losing motivation. You cannot force your kid to want to be successful. What if the conflict is actually just two different definitions of success? Next week, I am launching a solution I am calling “From Expectation to Ownership.” Stay tuned and I will tell you more about it.

“Support me and I’ll do better”: Autonomy-supportive parenting in enhancing adolescents’ homework outcomes. (2026). School Mental Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12310-026-09856-4

Cooper, H., Robinson, J. C., & Patall, E. A. (2006). Does homework improve academic achievement? A synthesis of research, 1987–2003. Review of Educational Research, 76(1), 1–62.