Some may argue, but school today is one tough job.
Kids these days start classes earlier than my first alarm even goes off. They attend classes back to back to back for eight hours straight, and then after a full day of exerting some serious brain power, they go home to drain the brain more on who knows how many hours of homework. It’s a full-time job, being a student of any age.
For one mother, enough was enough after her 10-year-old daughter, Maya, became physically ill as a result of the stress that school and homework had become for her.
Bunmi Laditan took to Facebook after emailing Maya’s teacher and letting her know that she is “all done.”
Bunmi Laditan
“My kid is done with homework. I just sent an email to her school letting her know she’s all done. I said “drastically reduce” but I was trying to be polite because she’s finished.”
Bunmi explains that her 10-year-old is a reading machine, and a very savvy independent learner.
“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.“
She continues:
“But over the past four years I’ve noticed her getting more and more stressed when it comes to school.”
Bunmi Laditan
Bunmi reiterates that the “stress” she’s talking about is chest pains, symptoms of anxiety, waking up early and totally dreading school all together. Sound familiar?
“She’s in school from 8:15am-4pm daily so someone please explain to me why she should have 2-3 hours of homework to do every night? How does homework until 6:30, then dinner, then an hour to relax (or finish the homework) before bed make any sense at all? 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?”
The concerned mother of three divulges some staggering statistics, revealing that homework is banned in Finland, and yet they have the highest rate of college-bound students in all of Europe. She cannot stress enough that sitting in a desk all day long, then sitting at the kitchen table all night long is not the making of a successful person. It’s the robbing of childhood and necessary down-time.
