Every parent in the Hills has stood at this fork. Your child is stuck. You know the answer. You could explain it in thirty seconds and everyone could get on with their evening. But some instinct says that if you do, you’ve done their homework for them, and they haven’t learned a thing.
So should you help or not? The answer is yes, but it depends enormously on what you mean by help. There’s a version of helping that builds a child’s capability and a version that quietly erodes it, and they look almost identical from the outside. Here’s how to tell them apart.
The Two Kinds of Helping
The unhelpful kind is the one that gets the homework finished. You explain, they write it down, the page is complete and correct, and you both feel a small sense of achievement. But the child hasn’t done any thinking. They’ve transcribed yours.
Do this often enough and two things happen. The child learns that being stuck is resolved by asking you, not by thinking. And the teacher receives a piece of work that suggests your child understands something they don’t, which means the gap goes unnoticed at school as well as at home.
The helpful kind is the one that gets the child thinking. It’s slower, it’s more annoying, and the page often ends up messier. But the child has done the cognitive work, which is the entire point of homework in the first place.
The test is simple. After you’ve helped, ask yourself who did the thinking. If it was you, the help wasn’t help.
How to Help Well
A few habits make the difference.
Ask rather than tell. When they’re stuck, resist the explanation and ask a question instead. What’s the question actually asking? What do you already know? What did you do on the one before? Questions push the thinking back to them, which is where it belongs.
Give the smallest hint that unsticks them, not the biggest one you have. If a nudge will do, don’t give a lecture. You’re trying to get them moving, not to deliver a lesson.
Sit with the silence. This is the hard part. When a child is stuck and quiet, the discomfort is real, and the instinct to fill it is powerful. Resist it for a bit longer than feels comfortable. Thinking looks like nothing happening, and a lot of parents interrupt their child’s thinking without realising it.
Let them be wrong. A page with mistakes that your child did themselves is more useful than a perfect page you produced together, because the mistakes are information their teacher needs. If you polish every error out, you’re hiding the very thing the school needs to see.
And separate the roles. You can be encouraging without being the teacher. “Have a go, and we’ll look at the tricky ones after” is a different offer from “let me show you.”
When to Stop Helping Altogether
Sometimes the right answer is to step back entirely, and there are two clear signals.
The first is conflict. If homework has become a nightly battle, the help has stopped working. The relationship cost is real, and it’s not worth it. A child who associates learning with arguing with their parent is picking up something worse than a maths gap.
The second is dependence. If your child cannot start, continue or finish without you, then your help has become a crutch rather than a support, and the longer it goes on the harder it gets to remove. High school will not provide you a seat at the desk.
In both cases, the honest conclusion is the same. The teaching needs to come from somewhere other than you. Not because you can’t do it, but because they won’t take it from you, which is a different problem and a very common one.
Why Children Won’t Take It From Their Parents
It’s worth naming this, because parents take it personally and shouldn’t.
A child has a relationship with you that has nothing to do with school. They can be frustrated with you, embarrassed in front of you, and safe enough with you to fall apart. All of that emotional history sits on the table alongside the maths worksheet, and it makes learning from you genuinely harder than learning from a coach they respect but aren’t tangled up with.
This is why the same child who screams at you about fractions will sit calmly and work with a tutor. It isn’t that you’re bad at explaining. It’s that you’re their parent.
How We Approach This at Boost
Part of what Boost does is take the teaching out of your hands, so you can go back to being the parent rather than the reluctant maths teacher.
Sessions run in small groups of six to eight with the same tutor each week, aligned to the NSW syllabus, built around Prime, Train, Retain: a few minutes of skills work, real teaching, then the student working through it themselves. That last part matters here, because it’s where a child practises being stuck and working through it without a parent beside them.
At home, Boost Accelerator is a short daily worksheet, deliberately short enough that a child can do it independently. Your job with it isn’t to teach. It’s to make sure it happens, which is a far easier and far less fraught role to play.
So yes, help with homework. Encourage, set up, ask good questions, and be interested. But if it’s turned into a nightly war, or if your child can’t function without you at the table, the most useful help you can offer is to hand the teaching to someone else and take your evenings back.
Book a free academic assessment and see exactly where your child’s foundations sit
