With less than an hour to go before my seven-year-old daughter’s bedtime, my home was a long way from being the oasis of calm I was hoping for at that time of evening.
Instead, Lily had just scribbled all over her homework worksheet, thrown her pencil on the floor and was now yelling at the top of her voice: “I hate Math! I suck at it!”
With my younger daughter to put to bed, Lily in a melt down and me exhausted after a day at work, the tension was rapidly rising.
But even if I could calm ourselves down, there was no end in sight. Even if I could persuade her to finish her math homework, Lily still had the whole book reading to do.
So I was facing two choices –
Should I stand over her and insist that not doing homework was NOT an option?
Or should I tell her to put the books away, write a note to her teacher and just let her unwind and play in the lead up to bedtime?
Have you been there? What choice would you make?
The choice I would make now is very different to what my choice would have been a few years back.
Back then, I’d try to push through with a mixture of cajoling and prompting and assurances that she did know how to do her Math really.
If that didn’t work then maybe in despair and frustration that she didn’t seem to want to try, I would have gotten angry and tried to explain how serious I was about this.