Parents these days are no strangers to homework.
Yes, homework, because with the ever-growing amount of workload their children get back home from school, many parents invariably have to sit down and crack their own heads to make sure their child is able to keep up.
But between school, homework and what’s left, where does actual learning without pressure, and family time go?
This is a question that bugged Bunmi Laditan, an American woman, blogger and mother of two in Quebec. She decided to act against her 10-year-old daughter’s growing homework and wrote to the school saying that Maya would be “drastically reducing” the amount of homework she does this year.
Bunmi put up on post on Facebook about the same on Wednesday, along with a screenshot of the email she sent to Maya’s school.
She began, “My kid is done with homework. I just sent an email to her school letting her know she's all done.” (sic)
“My 10-year-old loves learning. She independently reads 10-12 chapter books a year and regularly researches topics that interest her (right now she's writing a story about wolves). She takes coding classes, loves painting, and likes something called Roblox that I don't fully understand. But over the past four years I've noticed her getting more and more stressed when it comes to school. And by stressed, I mean chest pains, waking up early, and dreading school in general,” she continued.
Bunmi then wrote about how it made little sense for a child who spends 8.15am-4pm at school on a daily basis, to also come back home and do 2-3 hours of homework every night. She questioned why children should do homework till 6.30pm, have dinner and only an hour to relax before bedtime.
“Is family time not important? 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?” Bunmi argued.
She reiterates that Maya was “all done with homework” and if the school decided to punish her for it, she would have to figure out a way of homeschooling Maya although she didn’t prefer the option.
Bunmi’s message resonated with many and has been shared almost 20,000 times. Read the full post here:
In another post she put up two days later, Bunmi said that she will meet Maya’s school on Monday and discuss the homework issue.
While this incident happened miles away from India, childhoods suffering for hours of study, homework, and tuition is very real back home too.
Children as young as 10 start going for tuitions to crack a seat in the country’s top institutions, years into their future. Indian parents have also spoken about how their children spend hours after school finishing homework and going over lessons again. A 2015 study had even found that Karnataka’s class 8 students were burdened with most amount of homework in south India.
Clearly, there’s no dearth of Indian students reeling under academic burden. But would an Indian parent write such a letter to their child’s school?