Is homework making your child sick?

It may be tempting to dismiss this latest research, conducted in upper-middle-class areas, as yet another manifestation of the eccentricities of the affluent. This is, after all, the same demographic that recently brought us eye-roll-inducing news stories about $250-an-hour tutors who drill preschoolers on their ABCs and 1-2-3s, CNN reports. Could it be that a few short years later those same tots have graduated to marathon homework sessions? "The three hours of homework a night was an average, by the way," says Denise Pope, senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and co-author of the study published in the Journal of Experimental Education. "We had kids in the study who were doing way more," as many as five hours in some cases. Even in schools that have a policy limiting homework, advanced placement and honors classes are often exempt.

The study surveyed more than 4,300 students from 10 high-performing public and private high schools in upper-middle-class California communities. The researchers sought to examine the relationship between homework load and student well-being and engagement, as well as to understand how homework can act as a stressor in students' lives. Is it good to let kids screw up? Their findings were troubling: Research showed that excessive homework is associated with high stress levels, physical health problems and lack of balance in children's lives; 56% of the students in the study cited homework as a primary stressor in their lives. "We found a clear connection between the students' stress and physical impacts -- migraines, ulcers and other stomach problems, sleep deprivation and exhaustion, and weight loss," Pope observed. Pope's findings are particularly interesting when compared to recentNational Assessment of Educational Progress data about homework trends for the larger population. As it turns out, most students' homework load has remained remarkably stable since 1984, according to the Brookings Institute's 2014 Brown Center Report on American Education. So what's going on with the kids from affluent families? Pope and her colleagues focused on upper-middle-class, privileged schools because it is in these communities that the accepted value of homework is deeply and unquestioningly entrenched. Here many students describe schoolwork and the pressures of high academic performance as a dominating force in their day. Pope found in her work with Challenge Success, a Stanford collaboration formed in response to increasing emotional and mental health issues in American students, that homework kept coming up as a tension point. There were parents who wanted more homework and others who wanted less. There were parents who, if the teacher was not giving homework at the younger grades, would buy their own workbooks and hand them to their children. Pope even heard from parents lamenting that they had not seen their children over an entire holiday weekend because they were attempting to complete homework assignments. "We realized that we need intervention around homework," she said, and not just with high school students. While the present study was conducted with high schoolers, "we have the same data from the younger years." The researchers acknowledged the limitation of their reliance on students' self-reporting, but felt that it was important to explore the students' firsthand descriptions of their experiences with excessive homework.

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