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The High School Senior Year: A Parent’s Guide

By KidsDirect Editorial Team Junior year was about carrying a heavier load. Senior year is about carrying it to the finish line, and then handing most of it over. There’s real relief in that, for you and your teen both. There’s also a strange kind of pressure that shows up right when everyone expects things to ease up. Applications, financial aid, a countdown to graduation, and a teen who’s mentally halfway out the door already. Senior year asks you to do two things at once. Help your teen close this chapter well, and start loosening your grip before they even

The High School Sophomore Year: A Parent’s Guide

By KidsDirect Editorial Team Freshman year is loud. Everyone talks about the new building, the older kids, the adjustment. Sophomore year is quieter, and that’s exactly what makes it sneaky. Nobody warns you about tenth grade the way they warn you about ninth. But this is often the year a teen either settles into who they’re becoming. Or they start drifting somewhere you didn’t expect. This is high school sophomore year parent’s guide The Sophomore Slump Is Real, and It’s Not About Effort A lot of parents notice a strange dip in motivation right around tenth grade. Freshman year had

Ten Homework Tips

Research shows that kids do better in school when parents get involved in their homework, and it’s good for their confidence too. One thing worth checking first is whether the homework actually matches where your child is at. If your child is reading or doing math below grade level, the assignments should reflect that rather than just the grade they’re in. Ten tips for homework success Stay in touch with the teacher, so you know how much homework is coming and how your child’s actually doing with it. Set a regular start and end time. Most kids need a little

Viewing Homework as an Educational Liability

Every generation of parents has fought about homework at the kitchen table, and every generation has been told a slightly different story about why there’s so much of it. To understand where we are now, it helps to look at how we got here. Where the Homework Pressure Really Came From Homework didn’t pile up because educators discovered some new truth about how kids learn best. It grew mostly out of fear. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, American schools panicked that we were falling behind in science and math, and homework loads jumped almost overnight as a

Solutions to the Homework Dilemma

By Dr. Kalman Heller, Child and Family Psychologist The After-School Ritual The ritual usually starts with the first after-school sighting of a child by a parent. “How much homework do you have?” Should parents help with homework? Eventually comes the inevitable “Have you done your homework?” For a lot of parents, a real chunk of every evening goes to assisting, checking, or arguing about homework. Time with our kids is so limited and so precious. Is this really how it should be spent? No. What Parents Are Actually Responsible For What is a parent’s actual responsibility when it comes to

Pros and Cons of Summer Tutoring

Pros and Cons of Summer Tutoring at a Glance By Dr. Kalman Heller, Child and Family Psychologist Before you decide anything, here’s the short version. A meta-analysis of 39 studies found kids come back to school in the fall testing about a month behind where they left off in spring, and math skills alone can slide by 25 to 34 percent over the break. That’s a real gap. But tutoring isn’t automatically the right answer for every kid, and it comes with real tradeoffs too. Here’s how it breaks down. The Pros It can close a real gap before it