If you're lucky, homework is a thing of the past for you — but in recent years, there seems to be a growing concern that kids are getting way too much homework, even at grade-school levels. Mom and author Bunmi Laditan has had it with the amount of work her daughter gets, and in a now-viral Facebook post, explained why she's declaring that her daughter is "done" with homework.
Laditan wrote that she had to send an email to her daughter's school to tell the teachers that her daughter would "drastically reduce" the amount of homework she does. While Laditan's 10-year-old loves independent learning, reads books on her own outside of school, and even takes coding classes, her school work has become too much for her.
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"Over the past four years I've noticed her getting more and more stressed when it comes to school," she wrote. "And by stressed I mean chest pains, waking up early, and dreading school in general."
Laditan pointed out that having a child in school from 8:15 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day, only to come home to 2-3 hours of homework, can be excessive.
"Is family time not important?" she asked. "Is time spent just being a child relaxing at home not important? Or should she become some kind of junior workaholic at 10 years old?"
"Children do not need hours of homework time to succeed yet we act like sitting at a kitchen table after a full day at school somehow makes sense," she continued. "It does not."
Instead, she said, we need to let kids be kids — give them time to socialize with their friends, and enjoy bonding time with their parents. We all want our children to succeed, but part of that success is being able to be mentally and emotionally healthy.
"While I believe in education, I don't believe for one second that academics should consume a child's life," she wrote.
A study from 2015 published in the American Journal of Family and Therapy, found that kids have three times too much homework, which was detrimental to their social skills, self-confidence, and overall quality of life.
Laditan makes a valid point — after all, we often judge kids and teens who spend too much time looking at a screen or using social media, but we often ignore the fact that they might have to resort to socializing online because their schedules are so packed with homework and extracurricular activities.
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