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Comment by VBprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

  * If you anticipate your child being assigned 3 hours of homework in a typical evening, it is negligent to allow them to start that work at 8:00PM. Instead of allowing his daughter to watch episodes of Portlandia on her computer all afternoon, he could consider a rule suggesting homework gets completed before electronic entertainment; that's our rule this year (for the first time) and it's working better than I thought it would. Another rule we have: complete or not, homework is done at 9:30PM.

The parent doesn't say, but its entirely possible that his daughter has non-academic hobbies. Perhaps she competes in a sport, dances or feeds the homeless. In-fact, wouldn't it be more negligent to deny her the opportunity to take part in those non-academic activities?

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If her hobbies are conflicting with her homework, she can either (a) accept poorer grades or (b) set aside some hobbies. What he's doing --- demanding perfect grades with a schedule that doesn't have her starting homework until 8:00PM --- is physically harming his kid.

That math didn't jump out at me, but you're right. Maybe she only starts the homework when he gets home?

The pressure on these kids is immense, which is why you see cheating scandals in the top NYC schools. http://gothamschools.org/2013/08/30/report-faults-former-stu...

The author's child is still a kid. I think she's in year 8? Here's my feedback: a. Let her be a kid. b. let her get enough sleep (it's hard to learn without enough sleep). c. Stop taking cannabis. It can lead to mental illness. d. If you are concerned about too much homework, do something about it. For real.

Honestly, whenever I felt like I had too much homework, I just didn't do it. You can always discuss these things with the teachers. Usually they're not complete dicks that want to ruin your life.

Let your kid grow a spine. (continuous) Sleep loss as a kid is very bad.

When I didn't want to keep doing homework in High School, they dropped me from "honors" math to regular math and gave me poor grades. They continued to give me bad grades occasionally (since I didn't do the homework, occasionally) but it seemed like everyone met a decent compromise and the teacher didn't have any particular ire towards me.

> Stop taking cannabis. It can lead to mental illness.

... in a small percentage of the population (though a real risk).

The weird thing about the cannabis mention in this article is how irrelevant it was to his story. He mentions smoking up so he can explain how hard it is to do algebra while high. Uh, and? Is your daughter doing her algebra homework stoned?

I got the impression that he mentioned it to signal that he's a "cool parent". But that hurts his point; it makes the rest of the argument seem like it might be the product of aloofness rather than productive, tactical concern.

The way I read it, the marijuana references tie back to his youth and are meant to contrast his youth to his daughter's. I actually found them pretty powerful. The feeling I came away with was: is this (ultimately low-value) homework causing her to miss out on opportunities to be a teenager and do teenager things, like smoking weed behind her parents' backs, making out with other teenagers, and making other irresponsible-but-ultimately-valuable decisions in her personal life? In a way it made me sad for her.

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