Imagine that you’re in a language immersion class for a language you do not speak.  At all.  

Maybe you’ve heard it spoken, but you don’t understand it or know how to speak it.  Now imagine that it is an advanced class and everyone around you seems pretty fluent and although they may struggle a little bit to pick up the new material, with a little bit of practice, they’re able to get it and move on to the next lesson.  But you?  You’re completely lost.  You want to ask for help, but you don’t even know how.  What would you do in this situation?  How would you handle it?  Did I mention that you have to go to this class?  You can’t drop it.  So you might try hard to learn the language for a while.  You might try hard to do well in this class, but if you don’t have the foundational skills to make any progress, it might get discouraging pretty quickly, especially when everyone around you seems to be picking it up with ease.  After a while, it’s likely that you would give up and mentally check out.  You’d keep showing up because you have to, but whether you try hard or whether you don’t try at all, the result seems to be the same:  failure.  

This situation is all too familiar for many students with disabilities.  Students with ADHD, anxiety, learning disabilities, autism, or any other type of disability that impacts their ability to learn in the classroom often check out of instruction when they feel that their efforts to keep up are useless.  This “checking out” behavior in the face of repeated failure is caused by learned helplessness.

As a result, students with disabilities might be missing foundational, background knowledge that many of their typically developing peers have mastered and that is necessary to make sense of what is going on in class. This is especially pronounced in high school and college, when the pace, depth, and breadth of instruction increases and when it is assumed that students have all of the requisite skills and knowledge necessary to make reasonable educational progress in their courses.  

Along the way, many students with disabilities have developed coping mechanisms in order to get by, and while they may have been successful in the short-term, these coping mechanisms are usually maladaptive and create gaps in knowledge along with a whole host of other problems.  One of these coping mechanisms is checking out of instruction due to learned helplessness.  It’s a protective strategy that works in a few ways…  

• It protects a student’s mental and emotional energy:  Students with disabilities are already working harder - sometimes exhausting themselves - to do what their peers are doing.  If tremendous effort in certain classes yields failure, it would make sense to conserve that energy in order to apply it where it can lead to progress.  

• It protects a student’s sense of self-worth:  It can be devastating to realize that “I’m trying my best and I’m failing.”  This is especially damaging during adolescence when social comparison is so salient.  Many students with disabilities find it much less of a blow to their self-worth to stop trying altogether, and then if they fail, the fault does not lie within themselves; failure is not confirmation that they are less-than or that something is wrong with them - they simply did not try. 

Parents, this is your opportunity to remove yourselves from the homework equation!

Moving homework out of the home allows you to arrange conditions under which there is an increased likelihood of homework being completed (because, ideally, this out-of-the-home location offers few other alternatives) while decreasing the likelihood that homework will not be completed (i.e., decreasing the likelihood that your child will engage in more preferred activities). Voila, your work is done! No nagging, no battle, no muss, no fuss!

Reason #2 to move homework out of the home:

In addition to the association that your child has made that home is the place to unplug from academics, home is also filled with tons of competing distractions (screens, friends, etc). Moving homework out of the home eliminates access to these distractions.

As an adult with a fully-formed brain, even I have to leave my house if I want to be productive. At home, there is always something else to do - cleaning, playing with the dogs, watching Netflix, etc. The still-developing brains of children and teens lack the full ability to anticipate long-term consequences of behavior. For a child with learning or attention disabilities, this effect is magnified. Asking a mentally exhausted child to forgo the temptations of the many distractions of home that are available RIGHT NOW in favor of more schoolwork (with some abstract consequences that occur sometime later), is a tall order.

If you were trying to eat healthfully, would you stock up on junk food? Of course not! If your regular drive took you past a doughnut shop (you know the one...you can smell it blocks away and it may even have a brightly flashing sign alerting you when freshly-baked, hot doughnuts are ready NOW) you might alter your route. By limiting access, you eliminate the need to have to overcome temptation.

Moving homework out of the home accomplishes this for your child. We are not asking them to engage in the monumentally taxing task of resisting temptation, because the temptation is not there.

How is moving homework out of the home helpful? Ah, let us count the ways! 

The long academic day is mentally exhausting for most children, especially for those who have to work extra hard due to learning or attention disabilities. Over their entire school careers, they've come to see that home represents the endpoint to the school day's stressors and functions as the starting point of recovery. 

What is your reaction to this picture? Do you crave this comfort? Does is make you feel cozy? Do you wish you were there? This is what home, at the end of a school day, looks like to your child. In the same way Pavlov's dogs salivated at the sound of a bell, our children make the cognitive transition from school to rest when they get home. This association has become automatic. It is strong and visceral, and will be difficult to undo. 

Rather than continuing to spin your wheels by constantly nagging your child to do their homework, allow them to create a new association by finding a "homework place" outside of the home. Public libraries, coffee shops, and possibly even your child's school (many are open after school hours, just check first) are good starting places. You may have to try out a few, but ultimately, we want your child to make a new association, that wherever this place is that they settle on signals "homework" to them. With time, it will become automatic.