A Facebook friend recently posted her frustration with trying to get her third-grade daughter to sit down and do her nightly homework. “Oh, yeah?” replied a friend of said friend in the comments, a New Jersey mother named Jennifer. “You should try it with a 4-year-old.”
My youngest son has yet to enter preschool, and when my older child was there, he spent more time in “circle” than on worksheets. Jennifer said that nightly homework assignments sent home with her preschooler frustrated both of them. “I watch him slumped over our coffee table, fake crying and moaning, begging to play. I know he’s not ready for the discipline, but I feel compelled to make him turn in his assignments. He’s not ready and neither am I!” As a parent, I wasn’t ready either. Jennifer’s story had to be a wild aberration, far from the norm — one child, one family, one wildly competitive preschool perhaps?