homework ruins family time

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Is homework robbing your family of joy? You're not alone

Children are not the only ones who dread their homework these days. In a 2019 survey of 1,049 parents with children in elementary, middle, or high school, Office Depot found that parents spend an average of 21 minutes a day helping their children with their homework. Those 21 minutes are often apparently very unpleasant.

Parents reported their children struggle to complete homework. One in five believed their children "always or often feel overwhelmed by homework," and half of them reported their children had cried over homework stress.

Parents are struggling to help. Four out of five parents reported that they have had difficulty understanding their children's homework.

This probably comes as no surprise to any parent who has come up against a third grade math homework sheet with the word "array" printed on it. If you have not yet had the pleasure, for the purposes of Common Core math, an array is defined as a set of objects arranged in rows and columns and used to help kids learn about multiplication. For their parents, though, it's defined as a "What? Come again? Huh?"

It's just as hard on the students. "My high school junior says homework is the most stressful part of high school...maybe that’s why he never does any," said Mandy Burkhart, of Lake Mary, Florida, who is a mother of five children ranging in age from college to preschool.

In fact, Florida high school teacher and mother of three Katie Tomlinson no longer assigns homework in her classroom. "Being a parent absolutely changed the way I assign homework to my students," she told TODAY Parents .

"Excessive homework can quickly change a student’s mind about a subject they previously enjoyed," she noted. "While I agree a check and balance is necessary for students to understand their own ability prior to a test, I believe it can be done in 10 questions versus 30."

But homework is a necessary evil for most students, so what is a parent to do to ensure everyone in the house survives? Parents and professionals weigh in on the essentials:

Understand the true purpose of homework

"Unless otherwise specified, homework is designed to be done by the child independently, and it's most often being used as a form of formative assessment by the teacher to gauge how the kids are applying — independently — what they are learning in class," said Oona Hanson , a Los Angeles-area educator and parent coach.

"If an adult at home is doing the heavy lifting, then the teacher never knows that the child isn't ready to do this work alone, and the cycle continues because the teacher charges ahead thinking they did a great job the day before!" Hanson said. "It's essential that teachers know when their students are struggling for whatever reason."

Hanson noted the anxiety both parents and children have about academic achievement, and she understands the parental impulse to jump in and help, but she suggested resisting that urge. "We can help our kids more in the long run if we can let them know it's OK to struggle a little bit and that they can be honest with their teacher about what they don't understand," she said.

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Help kids develop time management skills

Some children like to finish their homework the minute they get home. Others need time to eat a snack and decompress. Either is a valid approach, but no matter when students decide to tackle their homework, they might need some guidance from parents about how to manage their time .

One tip: "Set the oven timer for age appropriate intervals of work, and then let them take a break for a few minutes," Maura Olvey, an elementary school math specialist in Central Florida, told TODAY Parents. "The oven timer is visible to them — they know when a break is coming — and they are visible to you, so you can encourage focus and perseverance." The stopwatch function on a smartphone would work for this method as well.

But one size does not fit all when it comes to managing homework, said Cleveland, Ohio, clinical psychologist Dr. Sarah Cain Spannagel . "If their child has accommodations as a learner, parents know they need them at home as well as at school: quiet space, extended time, audio books, etcetera," she said. "Think through long assignments, and put those in planners in advance so the kid knows it is expected to take some time."

Know when to walk away

"I always want my parents to know when to call it a night," said Amanda Feroglia, a central Florida elementary teacher and mother of two. "The children's day at school is so rigorous; some nights it’s not going to all get done, and that’s OK! It’s not worth the meltdown or the fight if they are tired or you are frustrated...or both!"

Parents also need to accept their own limits. Don't be afraid to find support from YouTube videos, websites like Khan Academy, or even tutors. And in the end, said Spannagel, "If you find yourself yelling or frustrated, just walk away!" It's fine just to let a teacher know your child attempted but did not understand the homework and leave it at that.

Ideally, teachers will understand when parents don't know how to help with Common Core math, and they will assign an appropriate amount of homework that will not leave both children and their parents at wits' ends. If worst comes to worst, a few parents offered an alternative tip for their fellow homework warriors.

"If Brittany leaves Boston for New York at 3:00 pm traveling by train at 80 MPH, and Taylor leaves Boston for New York at 1:00 pm traveling by car at 65 MPH, and Brittany makes two half hour stops, and Taylor makes one that is ten minutes longer, how many glasses of wine does mommy need?" quipped one mom of two.

Also recommended: "Chocolate, in copious amounts."

Allison Slater Tate is a freelance writer and editor in Florida specializing in parenting and college admissions. She is a proud Gen Xer, ENFP, Leo, Diet Coke enthusiast, and champion of the Oxford Comma. She mortifies her four children by knowing all the trending songs on TikTok. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram .

Review: The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning

(An updated version of this piece is available at this link.)

The End of Homework by Etta Kralovec and John Buell offers a succinct and researched account of why homework does little to actually improve academic performance, and instead hurts a family’s overall well-being. Kralovec and Buell analyze and dissect homework studies over the last few decades, finding that most research supports their claims or, at-best, makes dubious claims on the affects of homework. Although written in 2000, The End of Homework makes arguments that are only strengthened today: homework is discriminatory toward the poor (and the wealth gap has grown), it separates families from their children (and families work longer hours, and homework assigned has increased), and academic results are mixed (and recent studies reflect this.)

At Human Restoration Project , one of the core systemic changes we suggest is the elimination of homework. Throughout this piece, I will include more recent research studies that add to this work. I believe that the adverse affects of homework are so strong that any homework assigned, outside of minor catching up or incredibly niche cases, does more harm than good.

Summarized within The End of Homework , as well as developmental psychologists, sociologists, and educators, are the core reasons why homework is not beneficial:

Homework is Inequitable

In the most practical terms, calls for teachers to assign more homework and for parents to provide a quiet, well-lit place for the child to study must always be considered in the context of the parents’ education, income, available time, and job security. For many of our fellow citizens, jobs have become less secure and less well paid over the course of the last two decades.

Americans work the longest hours of any nation . Individuals in 2006 worked 11 hours longer than their counterparts in 1979. In 2020, 70% of children live in households where both parents work. And the United States is the only country in the industrial world without guaranteed family leave. The results are staggering: 90% of women and 95% of men report work-family conflict . According to the Center for American Progress , “the United States today has the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world due to a long-standing political impasse.”

As a result, parents have much less time to connect with their children. This is not a call to a return to traditional family roles, or even to have stay-at-home parents. Rather, our occupational society is structured inadequately to allow for the use of homework, and Americans must change how labor laws demand their time. For those who work in entry level positions, such as customer service and cashiers, there is an average 240% turnover per year due to lack of pay, poor conditions, work-life balance, and mismanagement. Family incomes continue to decline for lower- and middle-class Americans, leaving more parents to work increased hours or multiple jobs. In other words, parents, especially poor parents, have less opportunities to spend time with their children, let alone foster academic “gains” via homework.

In an effort to increase engagement in homework, teachers have been encouraged to create interesting, creative assignments. Although this has good intentions, rigorous homework with increased complexity places more impetus on parents. As Gary Natrillo, an initial proponent of creative homework, stated later:

‘…not only was homework being assigned as suggested by all the ‘experts,’ but the teacher was obviously taking the homework seriously, making it challenging instead of routine and checking it each day and giving feedback. We were enveloped by the nightmare of near total implementation of the reform recommendations pertaining to homework…More creative homework tasks are a mixed blessing on the receiving end. On the one hand, they, of course, lead to higher engagement and interest for children and their parents. On the other hand, they require one to be well rested, a special condition of mind not often available to working parents…’

Time is a luxury to most Americans. With increased working hours, in conjunction with extreme levels of stress, many Americans don’t have the necessary mindset to adequately supply children with the attention to detail for complex homework. As Kralovec and Buell state,

To put it plainly, I have discovered that after a day at work, the commute home, dinner preparations, and the prospect of baths, goodnight stories, and my own work ahead, there comes a time beyond which I cannot sustain my enthusiasm for the math brain teaser or the creative story task.

Americans are some of the most stressed people in the world. Mass shootings, health care affordability, discrimination, sexual harassment, climate change, the presidential election, and literally: staying informed have caused roughly 70% of people to report moderate or extreme stress , with increased rates for people of color, LGBTQIA Americans, and other discriminated groups. 90% of high schoolers and college students report moderate or higher stress, with half reporting depression and lack of energy and motivation .

Perhaps the solution to academic achievement in America isn’t doubling down on test scores or increasing the work students do at home, but solving the underlying systemic inequities : the economic and discriminatory problems that plague our society? Kralovec and Buell note,

Citing the low test scores of American students has become a favorite cocktail party game. However, some scholars have offered a more nuanced explanation for the poor showing by U.S. students in international academic performance comparisons, suggesting that it may have more to do with high levels of childhood poverty and a lack of support for families in the United States than with low academic standards, shorter school days, and fewer hours spent on homework.

Finland, frequently cited as a model education system, enjoys some of the highest standards of living in the world:

• Finland’s life expectancy is 81.8 years, compare to the US’ 78.7 years and a notable difference exists in the US between rich and poor . Further, America’s life expectancy is declining, the only industrialized country with this statistic .
• Finland’s health care is rated best in the world and only spends $3,078 per capita, compared to $8,047 in the US.
• Finland has virtually no homelessness , compared to 500,000 homeless in the United States .
• Finland has the lowest inequality levels in the EU , compared to the United States with one of the highest inequality levels in the world . Research has demonstrated that countries with lower inequality levels are happier and healthier .

Outside of just convincing you to flat-out move to Finland, these statistics reflect that potentially — instead of investing hundreds of millions of dollars in initiatives to increase national test scores , such as homework strategies, curriculum changes, and nationwide “raising the bar” initiatives — the US should invest in programs that universally help our daily lives, such as universal healthcare and housing. The solution to test scores is rooted in solving America’s underlying inequitable society — shining a light on our core issues — rather than making teachers solve all of our community’s problems.

But Wait, Despite All This…Does Homework Even Work!?

‘Extensive classroom research of ‘time on task’ and international comparisons of year-round time for study suggest that additional homework might promote U.S. students’ achievement.’ This written statement by some of the top professionals in the field of homework research raises some difficult questions. More homework might promote student achievement? Are all our blood, sweat, and tears at the kitchen table over homework based on something that merely might be true? Our belief in the value of homework is akin to faith. We assume that it fosters a love of learning, better study habits, improved attitudes toward school, and greater self-discipline; we believe that better teachers assign more homework and that one sign of a good school is a good, enforced homework policy.

Numerous studies of homework reflect an inconsistent result. Not only does homework rarely demonstrate large, if any, academic gains for testing, there are many negative impacts on the family that are often ignored.

• Countries that assigned the least amount of homework: Denmark, Czech Republic, had higher test scores than those with the most amount of homework: Iran, Thailand .
• Quality of instruction, motivation, and ability are all correlated with student success in school. Yet homework may be marginal or counterproductive .
• Of all homework assigned, homework only saw marginal increases in math and science standardized testing , and had no bearing on grades.
• Homework added pressure and societal stress to those who already experienced the same at home , causing a further divide in academic performance (due to lack of time and financial stress.)

By bringing schoolwork home, the well-intentioned belief of promoting equity through high standards has the adverse affect of causing further inequity. Private and preparatory schools are notorious for extreme levels of homework assignment . Yet, many progressive schools assign no homework and achieve the same levels of college and career success . Again, the biggest predictor of college success has nothing to do with rigorous preparation, and everything to do with family income levels. 77% of students from high income families graduated from a highly competitive college, whereas 9% of students from low income families did the same .

School curriculum obsession in homework is likely rooted in studies that demonstrate increased test scores as a result of assigned homework. The End of Homework deciphers this phenomena:

Cooper’s work provides us with one more example of a problem that routinely bedevils all the sciences: the relationship between correlation and causality. If A and B happen simultaneously, we do not know whether A causes B or B causes A, or whether both phenomena occur casually together or are individually determined by another set of variables…Thus far, most studies in this area have amounted to little more than crude correlations that cannot justify the sweeping conclusions some have derived from them.

If other countries demonstrate educational success (albeit measured through standardized testing) with little to no assigned homework and limited school hours , shouldn’t we take a step back and analyze the system as a whole, rather than figure out better homework schemes?

A Reflection of Neoliberal Society

According to New York State’s Teacher of the Year in 1990:

‘[Schools] separate parents and children from vital interaction with each other and from true curiosity about each other’s lives. Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop — then they blame the family for its family to be a family. It’s like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, then pronouncing the photographer incompetent.’

Education often equates learning with work. I have to stop myself from behaving like an economics analysist: telling students to quit “wasting time”, stating that the purpose of the lesson is useful for future earnings, seeing everything as prep for college and career (and college is ultimately just for more earnings in a career), and making blanket assumptions that those who aren’t motivated will ultimately never contribute to society, taking on “low levels” of work that “aren’t as important” as other positions.

Since the nineteenth century, developmental psychology has been moving away from the notion that children are nothing more or less than miniature adults. In suggesting that children need to learn to deal with adult levels of pressure, we risk doing them untold damage. By this logic, the schoolyard shootings of recent years may be likened to ‘disgruntled employee’ rampages.

This mentality is unhealthy and unjust. The purpose of education should be to develop purpose. People live happier and healthier lives as a result of pursuing and developing a core purpose. Some people’s purpose is related to their line of work, but there is not necessarily a connection. However, the primary goal stated by districts, states, and the national government of the education system is to make “productive members of society.” When we double down on economic principles to raise complex individuals, it’s no wonder we’re seeing such horrific statistics related to childhood .

Further, the consistent pressure to produce for economic gain raises generations of young people to believe that wealth is a measurement of success and that specific lines of work create happiness. Teachers and parents are told to make their children “work hard” for future success and develop “grit.” Although grit is an important indicator of overcoming obstacles , it is not developed by enforcing grit through authoritarian classrooms or meaningless, long tasks . In fact, an argument could be made that many Americans accept their dramatically poor work-life balance and lack of access to needs such as affordable health care by being brought up in a society that rewards neoliberal tendencies of “working through it” to “eventually achieve happiness.”

Kralovec and Buell state,

Many of us would question whether our fighting with our children for twelve years about homework could possibly foster good habits. In contrast, participating in the decisions of the household and collaborating with others on common chores, from cooking to cleaning to doing routine repairs, are important life skills that also require good work habits. For many children, these habits are never learned because homework gets in the way of that work.

Americans have more difficulty than ever raising children, with increasing demands of time and rising childcare costs . Children often need to “pick up the slack” and help taking care of the home. In fact, children with chores show completely positive universal growth across the board . When teachers provide more and more homework, they take away from the parents’ ability to structure their household according to their needs. As written in The End of Homework ,

Most of us find we do not have enough time with our children to teach them these things; our ‘teaching’ time is instead taken up with school-mandated subjects. We often wonder if we wouldn’t have less tension in our society over prayer in schools if our children had more time for religious instruction at home and for participation in church activities. When school is the virtually exclusive center of the child’s educational and even moral universe, it is not surprising that so many parents should find school agendas (with which they may or may not agree) a threat to their very authority and identity.

Of course, this is not to say that it is all the teacher’s fault. Educators face immense pressure to carry out governmental/school policies that place test scores at the forefront. Many of these policies require homework , and an educator’s future employment is centered on enacting these changes:

As more academic demands are placed on teachers, homework can help lengthen the school day and thus ensure ‘coverage’ — that is, the completion of the full curriculum that each teacher is supposed to cover during the school year…This in itself places pressure on teachers to create meaningful homework and often to assign large amounts of it so that the students’ parents will think the teacher is rigorous and the school has high academic standards. Extensive homework is frequently linked in our minds to high standards.

Therefore, there’s a connection to be made between “work”-life balance of children and the people who are tasked with teaching them. 8% of the teacher workforce leaves every year , many concerned with work-life balance . Perhaps teachers see an increased desire to “work” students in their class and at home due to the pressures they face in their own occupation?

We have little opportunity to enjoy recreation, community events, local politics, or family life. Our diminished possibilities in this regard in turn reinforce our reliance on wages and the workplace. And even the family time that remains after the demands of work and commuting are met is increasingly structured by the requirements of the workplace and school.

The more we equate work with learning, and the more we accept a school’s primary purpose to prepare workers, the less we actually succeed at promoting academics. Instead, we bolster the neoliberal tendencies of the United States to work hard, yet comparably to other countries’ lifestyle gains, achieve little. The United States must examine the underlying inequities of peoples’ lives, rather than focus on increasing schools’ workloads and lessening children’s free time for mythical academic gains that lead to little change. Teacher preparation programs and popular authors need to stop promoting “ interesting and fun ways to teach ‘x’! ” and propose systemic changes that radically change the way education is done, including systemic changes to society at large. Only then will the United States actually see improved livelihoods and a better education system for all.

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I remember when the pandemic started, I wanted an extension to this one class because the teacher never gave me the class code to join for the Google Classroom, all the assignments were posted. I had three assignments due in one day, but it was his fault for not giving me the code, but he was saying that I'm a good student and I shouldn't be complaining and I'm like, "I'm not complaining. I'm just asking you to understand." I do all my assignments on-time, but the fact that I'd asked him for an extension even though it was his fault that I was not in the Google Classroom, kind of made me feel like what is going on because teachers should be very much understanding.

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More than two hours of homework may be counterproductive, research suggests.

A Stanford education researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter.   "Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good," wrote Denise Pope , a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Education .   The researchers used survey data to examine perceptions about homework, student well-being and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities. Along with the survey data, Pope and her colleagues used open-ended answers to explore the students' views on homework.   Median household income exceeded $90,000 in these communities, and 93 percent of the students went on to college, either two-year or four-year.   Students in these schools average about 3.1 hours of homework each night.   "The findings address how current homework practices in privileged, high-performing schools sustain students' advantage in competitive climates yet hinder learning, full engagement and well-being," Pope wrote.   Pope and her colleagues found that too much homework can diminish its effectiveness and even be counterproductive. They cite prior research indicating that homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night, and that 90 minutes to two and a half hours is optimal for high school.   Their study found that too much homework is associated with:   • Greater stress : 56 percent of the students considered homework a primary source of stress, according to the survey data. Forty-three percent viewed tests as a primary stressor, while 33 percent put the pressure to get good grades in that category. Less than 1 percent of the students said homework was not a stressor.   • Reductions in health : In their open-ended answers, many students said their homework load led to sleep deprivation and other health problems. The researchers asked students whether they experienced health issues such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems.   • Less time for friends, family and extracurricular pursuits : Both the survey data and student responses indicate that spending too much time on homework meant that students were "not meeting their developmental needs or cultivating other critical life skills," according to the researchers. Students were more likely to drop activities, not see friends or family, and not pursue hobbies they enjoy.   A balancing act   The results offer empirical evidence that many students struggle to find balance between homework, extracurricular activities and social time, the researchers said. Many students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills.   Also, there was no relationship between the time spent on homework and how much the student enjoyed it. The research quoted students as saying they often do homework they see as "pointless" or "mindless" in order to keep their grades up.   "This kind of busy work, by its very nature, discourages learning and instead promotes doing homework simply to get points," said Pope, who is also a co-founder of Challenge Success , a nonprofit organization affiliated with the GSE that conducts research and works with schools and parents to improve students' educational experiences..   Pope said the research calls into question the value of assigning large amounts of homework in high-performing schools. Homework should not be simply assigned as a routine practice, she said.   "Rather, any homework assigned should have a purpose and benefit, and it should be designed to cultivate learning and development," wrote Pope.   High-performing paradox   In places where students attend high-performing schools, too much homework can reduce their time to foster skills in the area of personal responsibility, the researchers concluded. "Young people are spending more time alone," they wrote, "which means less time for family and fewer opportunities to engage in their communities."   Student perspectives   The researchers say that while their open-ended or "self-reporting" methodology to gauge student concerns about homework may have limitations – some might regard it as an opportunity for "typical adolescent complaining" – it was important to learn firsthand what the students believe.   The paper was co-authored by Mollie Galloway from Lewis and Clark College and Jerusha Conner from Villanova University.

Clifton B. Parker is a writer at the Stanford News Service .

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Homework or Personal Lives?

Many students get home and the first thing they do is homework. They’re pressured by their parents to do their homework while simultaneously being encouraged to spend time with family, eat, spend time with friends, go outside, participate in sports or other extracurricular activities, and sleep for 7+ hours. Rather than motivating students to master material and learn efficiently, homework negatively impacts students by taking away from personal time that is necessary for them to lead balanced lives.

In an article published by The Washington Post by Gerald K LeTendre, a professor of education in education policy studies at Penn State, states that, “Worldwide, homework is not associated with high national levels of academic achievement.” This means that there is no direct correlation between homework and test grades, and very few studies have been able to prove this, and the ones that have were more of a reach. At Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia,  16 out of 19 of the students in Fire Stream agreed that homework adds extra stress onto them or takes time away from other things that they’re encouraged to do, such as sports, extra classes, extracurricular activities, family time, etc. This means that just over 84% of students in Fire Stream have agreed that homework is added stress and takes time away from things that they’re encouraged to do outside of school. Many students participate in these activities because they’re passionate about them and it makes them happy. Sports and exercise is proven to relieve stress, homework adds stress and if time for this stress reliever is taken away that just means more stress, this can cause more problems in many aspects of their lives.

In an article written by CNN about how homework has been banned in some cities and not others, “What is clear is that parents and kids don't live in the world of academic research; they live in the real world where there are piles of homework on the kitchen table.” Meaning that students don’t have the luxury of just easily saying that homework helps their academic performance or not, and they don’t have the luxury of just not doing homework. That is especially true to highschool students who have to regularly chose between sleep and doing work, especially when they get homework from every class every night and homework can be up to 30% of their grade. Students in every grade get piles of homework and a lot of the time they don’t have resources on hand to see if they’re right or to get help, meaning they might do it wrong and not learn anything at all.  Even if students do try and do their homework it might take a while, according to Nationwide Children’s Hospital adolescents should be getting 9 to 9 ½ hours of sleep per night. Due to homework and trying to fit other after school activities in many adolescents don’t get the necessary amount of sleep. Sleep deprivation in teens has many negative effects such as mood changes, being more inclined to engage in risky behavior such as driving fast, drinking, etc, doing worse in school, and declined cognitive abilities.

In an article published by the New York Times, a mother explained how… , “The stress homework places on families starts early.” The article also talks about how homework takes away from family time and family activities. The author also says that her kids “are fighting not just over the homework, but also over their share of my coveted attention and my unique ability to download and print images.” This shows how homework adds extra pressure and can cause tension in families. It takes away from family time and causes more stress on students and parents. It’s almost as if once children start school and the homework starts that it never stops, and that more family time is taken away while more stress is added.

In a study concluded in 2003 by Dr. Harris Cooper he tries to argue that homework has a positive effect on students, but his studies also found no direct correlation between increased homework for students and improved test scores. Cooper himself said that “The analysis also showed that too much homework can be counter-productive for students at all levels.” Meaning that excessive amounts of homework can cause negative effects on students, but who is judging what excessive amounts of homework means? He talks about the “10 minute rule” meaning that every grade that a student increases they should get 10 more minutes of homework, meaning that a second grader should get 20 minutes, and a twelfth grader should get around 2 hours of homework. That would seem ideal, but in most high school settings teachers don’t interact with each other to see how much homework each of them give to equal it out to around 2 hours. This means that one class’s homework could take a student 2 hours alone and that would be what the ideal amount of homework is, so if it takes 2 hours for one class’s homework then how are students supposed to have positive benefits from doing all of their homework? Cooper’s research was also limited because very little research was done to see if student’s race, socioeconomic status, or even their ability levels has an affect on how much homework is “good” for said age range. This means that other aspects than just that they’re students in a certain grade weren’t taken into consideration. These things could cause major changes to the data that was collected.

Rather than encouraging students to master material and learn efficiently, homework negatively impacts students and families by causing more stress and taking away from family time. This is a problem not just for the overworked students, but also for students who have more complex personal lives. Many students work or have family obligations that they have to deal with, but don’t necessarily feel comfortable talking to a teacher about them. Although teachers might not think that the amount of homework that they give matters much,its influence goes beyond giving students work to do at home to how they interact in other important personal aspects of their life.

Works Cited:

LeTendre, Gerald K. “Homework Could Have an Effect on Kids’ Health. Should Schools Ban It?” The Washington Post , WP Company, 2 Sept. 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/09/02/homework-could-have-an-effect-on-kids-health-should-schools-ban-it/?utm_term=.3ed6d0fa2c72.

Kralovec, Etta. “Should Schools Ban Homework?” CNN , Cable News Network, 5 Sept. 2014, www.cnn.com/2014/09/05/opinion/kralovec-ban-homework/index.html.

Dell'Antonia, Kj. “Homework's Emotional Toll on Students and Families.” The New York Times , The New York Times, 12 Mar. 2014, parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/homeworks-emotional-toll-on-students-and-families/.

“Duke Study: Homework Helps Students Succeed in School, As Long as There Isn't Too Much.” Duke Today , Duke Today, 7 Mar. 2006, today.duke.edu/2006/03/homework.html.

“Sleep in Adolescents (13-18 Years).” Sleep in Adolescents :: Nationwide Children's Hospital , www.nationwidechildrens.org/sleep-in-adolescents

Comments (1)

A question that I have after reading this is in what other ways can we as students improve our learning without homework?

This 2fer has changed my opinion about how much homework affects a student's life in a bad way more than a good way.

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The New York Times

Motherlode | homework’s emotional toll on students and families, homework’s emotional toll on students and families.

When your children arrive home from school this evening, what will be your first point of conflict? How’s this for an educated guess? Homework.

Do they have any? How much? When are they going to do it? Can they get it done before practice/rehearsal/dinner? After? When is it due? When did they start it? Even parents who are wholly hands off about the homework itself still need information about how much, when and how long if there are any family plans in the offing — because, especially for high school students in high-performing schools, homework has become the single dominating force in their nonschool lives.

Researchers asked 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities to describe the impact of homework on their lives, and the results offer a bleak picture that many of us can see reflected around our dining room tables. The students reported averaging 3.1 hours of homework nightly, and they added comments like: “There’s never a break. Never.”

It “takes me away from everything I used to do,” says one.

Lack of sleep and lack of time were a theme, said the researcher Denise Clark Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of the study, which will be published in The Journal of Experimental Education. While the students didn’t report grieving for the children they were just a few months or years ago, they should have. There is something about that phrase — “everything I used to do” — that makes a parent take notice.

It’s not just the hours, Ms. Pope said. Students describe stress and sleep deprivation. “They feel out of control,” she said. “They often have no idea when a teacher will assign what. They can’t plan around Grandma’s birthday dinner, and it’s really not their fault.”

My students aren’t even in high school yet (my oldest is a seventh grader), and I’m not looking forward to the change. I don’t want them to give up “everything they used to do.” Already, homework struggles dominate many of our evenings. For some children at some ages (it has varied with mine), just getting them to sit down takes more time than the worksheets in their backpacks. For others, homework becomes an excellent place to enact a nightly dramatic rendition of “I Can’t Do It” (whether they can or not). The stress homework places on families starts early.

There are parenting strategies available to deal with those struggles, certainly — but when, and why, did our evenings at home become so dedicated to that particular interaction? I’m perpetually dismayed by how much of our evenings is consumed by schoolwork, and at the end of a particularly fraught night — for example, one when my two second graders each have a report on a South American animal due, and are fighting not just over the homework, but also over their share of my coveted attention and my unique ability to download and print images — I find myself wondering how our family life would be different without the flash point that homework so often becomes.

For the older students who participated in the research, homework was a family flash point of a different kind. Ms. Pope and her colleagues intentionally designed their research and wrote their paper to focus on the voices of the students and on their perspective about homework, arguing that it is the students’ experience that “influences how they do their homework, and consequently, how homework affects them.”

Much of the pressure they described feeling came from their parents, Ms. Pope said, and a sense that if they didn’t do the homework, they wouldn’t get the grades and they wouldn’t succeed. For those students (no matter what their parents might say about the same interactions), homework is affecting their relationship with their parents and how they feel about their family and their place in it.

To take my relationship with my children out from under homework’s shadow, I have pulled back (way back) on any involvement, and we have made an active choice as parents to let the work and any consequences for not doing it fall to their schools, not to us. That doesn’t work for all families. It also doesn’t help when the sheer number of hours a child is expected to spend at his books is destructive to family relationships because there is little or no time left to spend together, particularly once a sport or other activity enters the mix.

Ms. Pope suggests asking teachers and schools to provide homework packets that a student can spread out over a week, rather than springing large assignments due tomorrow that can derail family plans. Schools and teachers can also help by building in time for students to get started on homework and ask any questions they might have.

Looking at the larger picture, she said, things are changing. “These students are already averaging an hour more than what’s thought to be useful,” she said, and teachers, schools and parents are beginning to think harder about what kinds of homework, and how much of it, enhance learning and motivation without becoming all-consuming.

It might be easier than you think to start the conversation at your student’s school. “Load doesn’t equal rigor,” Ms. Pope said. “There are other developmental things students need to be doing after school, and other things they need to be learning.”

And if you are at the point where some of the pressure over homework might just be coming from you? “Don’t fall into the trap of parent peer pressure,” said Ms. Pope, a mother of three. “Nothing is permanent, and it’s up to you to remind your children that. We live in a country where you can drop out of high school and later community college and still ultimately get a Ph.D. from Stanford. At a certain point, it’s O.K. to get some sleep instead of studying for that test.”

And it’s really O.K. to go out to dinner for Grandma’s birthday. When do they assign the homework that teaches students that while work matters, family matters more?

Follow KJ Dell’Antonia on Twitter at @KJDellAntonia or find her on Facebook and Google+ .

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August 16, 2021

Is it time to get rid of homework? Mental health experts weigh in

by Sara M Moniuszko

It's no secret that kids hate homework. And as students grapple with an ongoing pandemic that has had a wide-range of mental health impacts, is it time schools start listening to their pleas over workloads?

Some teachers are turning to social media to take a stand against homework .

Tiktok user @misguided.teacher says he doesn't assign it because the "whole premise of homework is flawed."

For starters, he says he can't grade work on "even playing fields" when students' home environments can be vastly different.

"Even students who go home to a peaceful house, do they really want to spend their time on busy work? Because typically that's what a lot of homework is, it's busy work," he says in the video that has garnered 1.6 million likes. "You only get one year to be 7, you only got one year to be 10, you only get one year to be 16, 18."

Mental health experts agree heavy work loads have the potential do more harm than good for students, especially when taking into account the impacts of the pandemic. But they also say the answer may not be to eliminate homework altogether.

Emmy Kang, mental health counselor at Humantold, says studies have shown heavy workloads can be "detrimental" for students and cause a "big impact on their mental, physical and emotional health."

"More than half of students say that homework is their primary source of stress, and we know what stress can do on our bodies," she says, adding that staying up late to finish assignments also leads to disrupted sleep and exhaustion.

Cynthia Catchings, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist at Talkspace, says heavy workloads can also cause serious mental health problems in the long run, like anxiety and depression.

And for all the distress homework causes, it's not as useful as many may think, says Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, a psychologist and CEO of Omega Recovery treatment center.

"The research shows that there's really limited benefit of homework for elementary age students, that really the school work should be contained in the classroom," he says.

For older students, Kang says homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night.

"Most students, especially at these high-achieving schools, they're doing a minimum of three hours, and it's taking away time from their friends from their families, their extracurricular activities. And these are all very important things for a person's mental and emotional health."

Catchings, who also taught third to 12th graders for 12 years, says she's seen the positive effects of a no homework policy while working with students abroad.

"Not having homework was something that I always admired from the French students (and) the French schools, because that was helping the students to really have the time off and really disconnect from school ," she says.

The answer may not be to eliminate homework completely, but to be more mindful of the type of work students go home with, suggests Kang, who was a high-school teacher for 10 years.

"I don't think (we) should scrap homework, I think we should scrap meaningless, purposeless busy work-type homework. That's something that needs to be scrapped entirely," she says, encouraging teachers to be thoughtful and consider the amount of time it would take for students to complete assignments.

The pandemic made the conversation around homework more crucial

Mindfulness surrounding homework is especially important in the context of the last two years. Many students will be struggling with mental health issues that were brought on or worsened by the pandemic, making heavy workloads even harder to balance.

"COVID was just a disaster in terms of the lack of structure. Everything just deteriorated," Kardaras says, pointing to an increase in cognitive issues and decrease in attention spans among students. "School acts as an anchor for a lot of children, as a stabilizing force, and that disappeared."

But even if students transition back to the structure of in-person classes, Kardaras suspects students may still struggle after two school years of shifted schedules and disrupted sleeping habits.

"We've seen adults struggling to go back to in-person work environments from remote work environments. That effect is amplified with children because children have less resources to be able to cope with those transitions than adults do," he explains.

'Get organized' ahead of back-to-school

In order to make the transition back to in-person school easier, Kang encourages students to "get good sleep, exercise regularly (and) eat a healthy diet."

To help manage workloads, she suggests students "get organized."

"There's so much mental clutter up there when you're disorganized... sitting down and planning out their study schedules can really help manage their time," she says.

Breaking assignments up can also make things easier to tackle.

"I know that heavy workloads can be stressful, but if you sit down and you break down that studying into smaller chunks, they're much more manageable."

If workloads are still too much, Kang encourages students to advocate for themselves.

"They should tell their teachers when a homework assignment just took too much time or if it was too difficult for them to do on their own," she says. "It's good to speak up and ask those questions. Respectfully, of course, because these are your teachers. But still, I think sometimes teachers themselves need this feedback from their students."

©2021 USA Today Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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• Mental Health , Research
• Written by Cara Goodwin, Ph.D.

Homework: The Good and The Bad

Homework.  A single word that for many brings up memories of childhood stress. Now that you’re a parent, you may be reminded of that feeling every time your child spills their backpack across the table. You also may be questioning how much homework is too much and wondering how you can best help your child with their schoolwork.

Here, Dr. Cara Goodwin of Parenting Translator explains what the research actually says about homework. She outlines specific ways parents can support their kids to maximize the academic benefits and develop lifelong skills in time management and persistence.

In recent years, many parents and educators have raised concerns about homework. Specifically, they have questioned how much it enhances learning and if its benefits outweigh potential costs, such as stress to the family.

So, what does the research say?

Academic benefits vs risks of homework

One of the most important questions when it comes to homework is whether it actually helps kids understand the content better. So does it? Research finds that homework is associated with higher scores on academic standardized tests for middle and high school students, but not for elementary school students (1, 2).

In other words, homework seems to have little impact on learning in elementary school students. 

Additionally, a 2012 study found that while homework is related to higher standardized test scores for high schoolers, it is not related to higher grades.

Not surprisingly, homework is more likely to be associated with improved academic performance when students and teachers find the homework to be meaningful or relevant, according to several studies (1, 3, 4). Students tend to find homework to be most engaging when it involves solving real-world problems (5).  

The impact of homework may also depend on socioeconomic status. Students from higher income families show improved academic skills with more homework and gain more knowledge from homework, according to research. On the other hand, the academic performance of more disadvantaged children seems to be unaffected by homework (6, 7). This may be because homework provides additional stress for disadvantaged children. They are less likely to get help from their parents on homework and more likely to be punished by teachers for not completing it (8).

Non-academic benefits vs risks of homework

Academic outcomes are only part of the picture. It is important to look at how homework affects kids in ways other than grades and test scores.

Homework appears to have benefits beyond improving academic skills, particularly for younger students. These benefits include building responsibility, time management skills, and persistence (1, 9, 10). In addition, homework may also increase parents’ involvement in their children’s schooling (11, 12, 13, 14).

Yet, studies show that too much homework has drawbacks. It can reduce children’s opportunities for free play, which is essential for the development of language, cognitive, self-regulation, and social-emotional skills (15). It may also interfere with physical activity, and too much homework is associated with an increased risk for being overweight (16, 17). 

In addition to homework reducing opportunities for play, it also leads to increased conflicts and stress for families. For example, research finds that children with more hours of homework experience more academic stress, physical health problems, and lack of balance in their lives (18). 

Clearly, more is not better when it comes to homework.

What is the “right” amount of homework? 

Recent reports indicate that elementary school students are assigned three times the recommended amount of homework. Even kindergarten students report an average of 25 minutes of homework per day (19).

Additionally, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that homework has been increasing in recent years for younger students. Specifically, 35% of 9-year-olds reported that they did not do homework the previous night in 1984 versus 22% of 9-years-old in 2012. However, homework levels have stayed relatively stable for 13- and 17-year-olds during this same time period. 

Research suggests that homework should not exceed 1.5 to 2.5 hours per night for high school students and no more than 1 hour per night for middle school students (1). Homework for elementary school students should be minimal and assigned with the aim of building self-regulation and independent work skills. A common rule , supported by both the National Education Association (NEA) and National Parent Teacher Association (PTA), is 10-minutes of homework per grade in elementary school. Any more than this and homework may no longer have a positive impact. Importantly, the NEA and the National PTA do not endorse homework for kindergarteners.

How can parents best help with homework?

Most parents feel that they are expected to be involved in their children’s homework (20). Yet, it is often unclear exactly how to be involved in a way that helps your child to successfully complete the assignment without taking over entirely. Most studies find that parental help is important but that it matters more HOW the parent is helping rather than how OFTEN the parent is helping (21).

While this can all feel very overwhelming for parents, there are some simple guidelines you can follow to ease the homework burden and best support your child’s learning.

1. Help only when needed.

Parents should focus on providing general monitoring, guidance and encouragement. Allow children to generate answers on their own and complete their homework as independently as possible . This is important because research shows that allowing children more independence in completing homework benefits their academic skills (22, 23). In addition, too much parent involvement and being controlling with homework is associated with worse academic performance (21, 24, 25). 

What does this look like?

• Be present when your child is completing homework to help them to understand the directions.
• Be available to answer simple questions and to provide praise for their effort and hard work.
• Only provide help when your child asks for it and step away whenever possible.

2. Have structure and routines.

Help your child create structure and to develop some routines. This helps children become more independent in completing their homework. Research finds that providing this type of structure and responsiveness is related to improved academic skills (25).

This structure may include:

• A regular time and place for homework that is free from distractions.
• Have all of the materials they need within arm’s reach.
• Teach and encourage kids to create a checklist for their homework tasks each day.

Parents can also help their children to find ways to stay motivated. For example, developing their own reward system or creating a homework schedule with breaks for fun activities.

3. Set specific rules around homework.

Research finds that parents setting rules around homework is related to higher academic performance (26). For example, parents may require that children finish homework before screen time or may require children to stop doing homework and go to sleep at a certain hour. 

4. Emphasize learning over outcome.

Encourage your child to persist in challenging assignments and frame difficult assignments as opportunities to grow. Research finds that this attitude is associated with student success (20). Research also indicates that more challenging homework is associated with enhanced school performance (27).

Additionally, help your child to view homework as an opportunity to learn and improve skills. Parents who view homework as a learning opportunity rather than something that they must get “right” or complete successfully to obtain a higher grade are more likely to have children with the same attitudes (28). 

5. Stay calm and positive.

Yes, we know this is easier said than done, but it does have a big impact on how kids persevere when things get hard! Research shows that mothers showing positive emotions while helping with homework may improve children’s motivation in homework (29)

6. Praise hard work and effort. 

Praise focused on effort is likely to increase motivation (30). In addition, research finds that putting more effort into homework may be associated with enhanced development of conscientiousness in children (31).

7. Communicate with your child’s teacher.

Let your child’s teacher know about any problems your child has with homework and the teachers’ learning goals. Research finds that open communication about homework is associated with improved school performance (32). 

In summary, research finds that homework provides some academic benefit for middle- and high-school students but is less beneficial for elementary school students. As a parent, how you are involved in your child’s homework really matters. By following these evidence-based tips, you can help your child to maximize the benefits of homework and make the process less painful for all involved!

For more resources, take a look at our recent posts on natural and logical consequences and simple ways to decrease challenging behaviors .

• Cooper, H., Robinson, J. C., & Patall, E. A. (2006). Does homework improve academic achievement? A synthesis of research, 1987–2003.  Review of educational research ,  76 (1), 1-62.
• Muhlenbruck, L., Cooper, H., Nye, B., & Lindsay, J. J. (1999). Homework and achievement: Explaining the different strengths of relation at the elementary and secondary school levels.  Social Psychology of Education ,  3 (4), 295-317.
• Marzano, R. J., & Pickering, D. J. (2007). Special topic: The case for and against homework.  Educational leadership ,  64 (6), 74-79.
• Trautwein, U., Lüdtke, O., Schnyder, I., & Niggli, A. (2006). Predicting homework effort: support for a domain-specific, multilevel homework model.  Journal of educational psychology ,  98 (2), 438.
• Shernoff, D. J., Csikszentmihalyi, M., Schneider, B., & Shernoff, E. S. (2014). Student engagement in high school classrooms from the perspective of flow theory. In  Applications of flow in human development and education  (pp. 475-494). Springer, Dordrecht.
• Daw, J. (2012). Parental income and the fruits of labor: Variability in homework efficacy in secondary school.  Research in social stratification and mobility ,  30 (3), 246-264.
• Rønning, M. (2011). Who benefits from homework assignments?.  Economics of Education Review ,  30 (1), 55-64.
• Calarco, J. M. (2020). Avoiding us versus them: How schools’ dependence on privileged “Helicopter” parents influences enforcement of rules.  American Sociological Review ,  85 (2), 223-246.
• Corno, L., & Xu, J. (2004). Homework as the job of childhood.  Theory into practice ,  43 (3), 227-233.
• Göllner, R., Damian, R. I., Rose, N., Spengler, M., Trautwein, U., Nagengast, B., & Roberts, B. W. (2017). Is doing your homework associated with becoming more conscientious?.  Journal of Research in Personality ,  71 , 1-12.
• Balli, S. J., Demo, D. H., & Wedman, J. F. (1998). Family involvement with children’s homework: An intervention in the middle grades.  Family relations , 149-157.
• Balli, S. J., Wedman, J. F., & Demo, D. H. (1997). Family involvement with middle-grades homework: Effects of differential prompting.  The Journal of Experimental Education ,  66 (1), 31-48.
• Epstein, J. L., & Dauber, S. L. (1991). School programs and teacher practices of parent involvement in inner-city elementary and middle schools.  The elementary school journal ,  91 (3), 289-305.
• Van Voorhis, F. L. (2003). Interactive homework in middle school: Effects on family involvement and science achievement.  The Journal of Educational Research ,  96 (6), 323-338.
• Yogman, M., Garner, A., Hutchinson, J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., & Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health. (2018). The power of play: A pediatric role in enhancing development in young children.  Pediatrics ,  142 (3).
• Godakanda, I., Abeysena, C., & Lokubalasooriya, A. (2018). Sedentary behavior during leisure time, physical activity and dietary habits as risk factors of overweight among school children aged 14–15 years: case control study.  BMC research notes ,  11 (1), 1-6.
• Hadianfard, A. M., Mozaffari-Khosravi, H., Karandish, M., & Azhdari, M. (2021). Physical activity and sedentary behaviors (screen time and homework) among overweight or obese adolescents: a cross-sectional observational study in Yazd, Iran.  BMC pediatrics ,  21 (1), 1-10.
• Galloway, M., Conner, J., & Pope, D. (2013). Nonacademic effects of homework in privileged, high-performing high schools.  The journal of experimental education ,  81 (4), 490-510.
• Pressman, R. M., Sugarman, D. B., Nemon, M. L., Desjarlais, J., Owens, J. A., & Schettini-Evans, A. (2015). Homework and family stress: With consideration of parents’ self confidence, educational level, and cultural background.  The American Journal of Family Therapy ,  43 (4), 297-313.
• Hoover-Dempsey, K. V., Battiato, A. C., Walker, J. M., Reed, R. P., DeJong, J. M., & Jones, K. P. (2001). Parental involvement in homework.  Educational psychologist ,  36 (3), 195-209.
• Moroni, S., Dumont, H., Trautwein, U., Niggli, A., & Baeriswyl, F. (2015). The need to distinguish between quantity and quality in research on parental involvement: The example of parental help with homework.  The Journal of Educational Research ,  108 (5), 417-431.
• Cooper, H., Lindsay, J. J., & Nye, B. (2000). Homework in the home: How student, family, and parenting-style differences relate to the homework process.  Contemporary educational psychology ,  25 (4), 464-487.
• Dumont, H., Trautwein, U., Lüdtke, O., Neumann, M., Niggli, A., & Schnyder, I. (2012). Does parental homework involvement mediate the relationship between family background and educational outcomes?.  Contemporary Educational Psychology ,  37 (1), 55-69.
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• Madjar, Shklar, & Moshe, 2016)
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Homework doesn't align with our family values. Here's how I explain that to teachers and my kids.

• I think there are more meaningful ways to spend the after school hours.
• I typically tell teachers that our family won't be completing homework.
• Sometimes, my fourth grader still wants to do the assignments.

Despite my best efforts to avoid over-scheduling my family, our weekday calendars are full. My daughters, in kindergarten and fourth grade, do horse riding , swim lessons , and soccer. I have powerlifting two evenings a week. As we run out the door to those activities, our dog looks at us longingly with his leash in his mouth, so we try to squeeze in walks with him.

All of that leaves very little time for homework . This is why I've decided that in our family, homework is strictly optional and sometimes downright discouraged.

The hours between after school and bedtime are so limited. My girls get home at about 3:45 p.m. and are off to bed by 6:30 p.m. Factor in dinner time, I have only two hours to offer them the after-school enrichment that most aligns with our family values.

Homework simply doesn't make the cut.

My daughter is supposed to do about 40 minutes of homework each night

It's important to acknowledge that my district doesn't give much homework in elementary school. My fourth grader is expected to do 20 minutes of reading and 10 minutes each for math facts and penmanship. Gone are the endless worksheets that I remember from school.

And yet, 40 minutes is a huge chunk of our afternoons together. Reading, math, and penmanship are important, but practicing them happens organically throughout our day — when we talk about money skills together or pen a letter to their grandparents.

Rather than sitting down at a desk for 40 minutes, I'd prefer my girls gain confidence and safety skills in the water, contribute to their community by doing barn chores, or just be silly outside in the fresh air.

I sent teachers an email saying we wouldn't be doing homework

I spoke to my daughter's teachers about homework in second grade when I first felt the pressure to choose between homework, after-school activities, and getting the kids to get on time.

I kept it straightforward and sent the teacher an email: "Our schedules make homework challenging, so my daughter will not be completing the weekly assignments. We'll continue to practice math and reading at home. Please let me know if you have any concerns about this now or in the future."

Neither that teacher nor the one after had any worries. I got the impression that their beliefs aligned with mine: there were many ways to learn in the afternoons, and not all of them were academic. As long as the lack of homework wasn't impacting my daughter in the classroom, skipping it was ok.

This year, we're doing more homework than ever before

This year, my approach to homework has been challenged, and I've been reminded that nothing is black and white. My kindergartener is in speech therapy and regularly has "homework" assignments from her therapist. Those go to the top of our priority list — not only does she love doing the exercises, but there's a clear benefit that we can hear with our own ears.

More surprisingly, my fourth grader has decided she's devoted to homework. Just like I was, she's a bit of a teacher's pet and gets genuine satisfaction from the check mark she receives on each assignment. I have no problem with her doing her homework for fun, as long as it's not coming at the expense of more important things, like sleep, outdoor time, and hobbies.

Recently she explained she was going to wake up extra early to complete her reading assignment for the day. I just raised an eyebrow and said, "You know you really don't have to do that, right?"

I'm not sure how we'll handle homework as she moves into middle, then high school. For now, we're taking a laid-back approach.

What Negative Effects Does Homework Have on a Student's Social & Family Life?

Van thompson, 25 jun 2018.

The amount of homework children bring home every day can be overwhelming. A 2004 University of Michigan study found that the amount of homework had increased 51 percent since 1981. While many educators use homework to supplement the material learned in class, homework doesn't always improve academic performance, and a 2003 "Review of Educational Research" study found that the current way teachers assign homework is not academically beneficial. Students who struggle with homework or who get a large volume of homework each night can experience negative effects in their family and social relationships.

Explore this article

• Time Constraints
• Family Stress
• Less Active Learning
• Disrupted Routines

1 Time Constraints

Homework takes time away from other pursuits. Children who have a large quantity of homework have less time to spend with their families and friends as regular social interaction plays a critical role in brain development. Children who get plenty of opportunities to interact with friends and family can gain valuable social, conflict management and impulse control skills. When homework reduces this time, children's social development may suffer.

2 Family Stress

It's not surprising that homework can greatly increase family stress. Parents may spend an inordinate amount of time fighting with their children over homework, enforcing homework rules and mastering concepts they need to help their children excel. The study found that stress, frustration and conflicts over homework are particularly pronounced in families with a child who is struggling academically.

3 Less Active Learning

Active learning is learning that occurs in context and that encourages participation. For example, a child who goes on a scavenger hunt with his friend and, upon seeing a frog, decides to watch the frog and learn about its movement is engaged in active learning. When homework takes children away from their friends and families, the opportunities for active learning are greatly decreased. This can decrease opportunities for parents to be involved in their children's education in a fun, mutually fulfilling way, and also reduces the amount of time children have to engage in active learning with their friends.

4 Disrupted Routines

Many families have established routines, such as eating dinner at a certain time or reading together before bed. These routines can increase closeness, make it easier to manage stress and ensure that a household runs smoothly. A child who has several hours of homework, for example, might not be able to eat dinner with her parents, and a parent might have to alter her schedule to help her child with homework. An everyday scenario like this, easily highlights how homework can disrupt family routines.

• 1 Child Development Supplement: Changing Times of American Youth
• 2 Penn State University: Is Homework Bad for Kids?

About the Author

Van Thompson is an attorney and writer. A former martial arts instructor, he holds bachelor's degrees in music and computer science from Westchester University, and a juris doctor from Georgia State University. He is the recipient of numerous writing awards, including a 2009 CALI Legal Writing Award.

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Trauma Treatment Center of Colorado

Help my child’s homework is destroying our family.

HELP! MY CHILD’S HOMEWORK IS DESTROYING OUR FAMILY!

            Throughout years of working with children and their families, I have heard well-meaning parents make countless complaints about their children’s homework. Grievances such as:

“I don’t understand how to do so much of this, I can’t help my child.”

           ” I  hate when my child has homework, it ruins the entire evening. My son becomes hysterical with               anxiety, especially when I can’t help him,”

           “My son is obsessed with getting good grades. He freaks out if his homework isn’t done perfectly.                He is stuck in his room all weekend doing homework. It limits what we can do as a family.”

            In the last decade, these homework grievances have increased. With mounting financial demands, necessitating full time jobs for both parents, parents have little time or energy to devote the amount of time it takes to tackle their children’s homework.

I often use the phrase, “ Parents on Steroids ” to describe the incredible amount of time, energy, focus, and planning it takes to raise a child in the twenty-first century. Technology abounds, making it difficult to carve out time for face-to-face interactions with children. Competition is at the highest in this generation as children are expected to excel at academics, sports, and technology.

Parents keep children well planned with activities and educational after-school opportunities to boost scores and athletic or artistic performance. They are highly invested in producing a well rounded, highly educated, and successful child. This results in children having very little free-time to play and explore the outdoors with their imagination. Even their “quiet time” is scheduled, along with other planned activities. Let’s face it, society in general is expecting a lot from these Generation Z children.

Children begin structured learning early on, as pre-schools develop academic kindergarten readiness programs, and kindergarten becomes “the new first grade.” And each successive grade promotes readiness for the next year. It is no wonder that homework has become a focal point of concern for so many parents. Children are expected to catapult their cognitive levels a year ahead, instead of enjoying and nurturing their developmental age.

Standardized testing has been a part of public school education for more than seventy years. In 2001 when George Bush signed No Child Left Behind, standardized tests became a way of hopefully ensuring that all children reach reading and math proficiency. However, this Bill has morphed into a measure for teacher effectiveness and overall school performance. Grants, teacher’s raises, and promotions are awarded to the schools with the best overall performance on standardized tests. With this type of pressure on to perform, teachers often pile on homework in an attempt to boost students’ scores on these tests.

Back in the 1890’s to 1920, there were reformers in the so-called “Progressive Era” that depicted homework as a “sin” that deprived children of their playtime. (It was during this era that women fought for the right to vote.) The Progressives worked hard to modernize and reform schools and they believed that homework was not an essential part of the leaning process.

Today many of the same educational concerns are coming to the forefront. And homework is once again being examined. Researches have studied whether homework is beneficial and their findings may shock you.

Studies show, in the lower grades, children are getting three times as much homework as recommended by the National Educational Program This is causing behavioral, physical, and health problems, as well as emotional stress and anxiety for parents and children. Over the last decade, children as young as nine have seen a nearly forty percent increase in homework. This increase in lower grade homework is generally linked to the push for schools to have high-standardized test scores.

The standard set by the National Education Program states that there be 10 minutes of homework given per grade beginning in first grade. However, even though this standard is set, researchers found the average amount of homework given to children well exceeds this standard. Even kindergarteners were receiving homework and in some schools, first graders were given 28 minutes of homework a night. (CNN report August 12, 2015)

Harris Cooper, a professor of education at Duke University, has recommended that students be given no more than 10 to 15 minutes of homework in the 2 nd grade and that this amount increases no more than 10 minutes in each successive grade.

Denise Pope, a Stanford University Education Professor and author of Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids (2015), states that children are overloaded with days as long as adults and burdening children with too much homework is not preparing children for the real tasks of life. Dr. Pope feels that children are overscheduled with after school activities and homework, leaving little time to engage in more collaborative, social, and creative outlets.

Richard Walker, an educational psychologist at Sydney University and his research team found that in countries where more time is spent on homework, students actually scored lower on an international standardized test. Studies have also pointed to the fact that homework bolsters student’s academic performance only during their last three years of high school. In “Reforming Homework: Learning and Policies, 2012 ), Richard Walker found that teachers typically give take-home assignments that are unhelpful or “busy work”.

Gerald LeTendre of Pennsylvania State University also found that teachers give take-home assignments that are unhelpful and remarked that assigned homework “appeared to be a remedial strategy, and not an advancement strategy. The latter is work that is designed to help children accelerate, improve, or excel. “Remedial homework” on the other hands, is homework that is given as a consequence of not covering topics in class, exercises for students struggling, or a way to supplement poor quality educational settings. It is the remedial type of homework that tends to produce marginally lower test scores compared to children who are not given this type of work.

Gerald LeTendre has been studying trends in education for over a decade and participated in Richard Walker’s international study of homework. Researchers studied 59 countries in this 2007 study. Countries that had top rates in math and science achievement reported homework time as less than the international mean. In Netherlands, nearly one out of five fourth graders reported doing no homework on school nights, even though the Dutch fourth graders put their country in the top ten in terms of average math scores.

These finding clearly suggest that homework is not always associated with high levels of academic achievement as it relates to standardized testing scores. Further many research studies have linked excessive homework to sleep disruption, indicating a negative relationship between the amount of homework and the perceived stress and physical health of children.

It is important to know, however, that other studies do not demonstrate the same concerns about overloading students with homework. Research from Brookings Institute and the Rand Corporation in 2003 analyzed data from a variety of sources and concluded that the majority of U.S. students spend less than an hour a day on homework, regardless of grade level. In the last 20 years, however, these researchers found that homework has increased only in the lower grades.

The amount of responsibility that is incurred by parents to help children with their homework has also increased. Since homework can often be too complex for students to complete by themselves, such difficult tasks require assistance from parents. This comes at a considerable cost to family life. Arguments, temper tantrums, and oppositional behaviors erode quality parent-child time in the evenings and weekends, and diminish overall harmony in the home.

Further, when parents and children conflict over homework, strong negative emotions are created promoting in the child a negative association with academic achievement.

What can be done to counter-act the negative impact of homework in the child and the family? The following are some suggesting that may help decrease the stress that you and your child are experiencing when it comes to homework assignments:

• Make sure you have open communication with your child’s teacher in order to address homework issues,
• It is best if your child’s teacher can tailor homework to your child’s individual needs, weighing the child’s age, family situation, and the need for skill development,
• Remember repetitive practice does not always contribute to new learning. It may help master a skill, but if a child learns a skill, practice can come easily in the school setting. A child should have enough practice at school to learn and master a new concept. Therefore, multiple pages of math equations will not help your child learn the concept if he or she has already mastered the skill. Talk to your child’s teacher if you see this type of repetitive homework,
• If you feel that your child is receiving too much homework, ask the school if provisions can be made for your child to complete some of this work at school. Remember the guidelines to the amount of homework that a child should be given. If the teacher is unwilling to budge, a meeting with the principal may be needed to address this issue,
• Regardless of the amount of homework your child has, be diligent to allow your child the freedom to play, even if they can’t finish their homework. Play is the real work of childhood, for in play children can learn to conquer fears, explore their creativity, and express feelings. Play is essential to children and so is their free time. Don’t overschedule your child with activities so that they don’t have time to play,
• If the homework is too difficult for you and your child to complete, contact the teacher rather than muddling through hours of mental exasperation and fatigue,
• Make sure that homework is scheduled at a reasonable time and does not begin later in the evening. Children need a rest after seven or so hours at school, so scheduling relaxation time for an hour or so after school is a good idea. However, remember that relaxing with electronics may not be the best way for your child to prepare for homework. Too much screen time will make your child’s brain somewhat sluggish. Outside exercise or imaginative play will help your child better prepare for homework.
• Scheduling homework while you are preparing dinner is also a recipe for disaster. You will not have the time to devote to your child and the anxiety will mount. If you can, find at least an hour before dinner preparations, or an hour after when you can sit down with your child and do homework. If they don’t need help, sit down next to your child and work on your own unfinished taxes, budgets, or finances. This will model for your child good study habits.
• Tackling homework in the evening may mean that your child will not have time to unwind and relax before bedtime. Winding down is critical for children to prepare for sleep. Preschoolers need at lest 11-13 hours each night, while school-aged children from six to thirteen should get at lest 9-11 hours of sleep. If homework time is disrupting their sleep, it is counterproductive to learning. Tired and anxious children do not make good students.
• Remember that your child’s academic success is not linked to the amount of time he or she is doing homework, so allow flexibility in the schedule, and don’t stress about unfinished homework. Teach your child to prioritize the homework and help set reasonable limitations and expectations.
• Most importantly help your child handle the stress of homework. It is critical that children learn how to deal with their emotions. Help your child find ways of relaxing and renewing energy before, during, and after homework.

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Homework Is Invading Our Free Time

Lili Stevens , Arts & Entertainment Editor | November 21, 2019

When I came up with the idea of writing this article, I was hoping to hear about the fun and exciting things my peers do during their off periods. What I really found out was that most kids just do homework.

This raises the question: are students procrastinating their homework and waiting to do it during their off periods, or do they simply have too much homework and too little time? 

I’d like to bring to light the homework issue present in high schools across the nation. If you ask any high schooler about their homework situation, it’s likely that you’ll receive an exasperated sigh and maybe an eye roll. They’re over it. It feels like teachers don’t understand that students have five or six other classes with teachers that all assign around the same amount of homework each night. This leads to students being responsible for up to five hours of homework a night. This doesn’t even take into account the time consumed by students’ extracurriculars, jobs, and family responsibilities. When you add u p all of these commitments, it’s understandable that students feel overworked.

America seems to have one of the biggest problems surrounding homework when compared with other nations. On average, U.S. students spend 6.1 hours doing homework each week, according to the World Atlas. Tied to that, America’s mental health crisis has become an epidemic. According to a study by Stanford University, 56 percent of students consider homework a primary source of stress. Students also reported that their homework levels resulted in sleep deprivation and other health problems. The study also reported that “students were not meeting their developmental needs…  and were more likely to drop activities” among other negative consequences. Overall, it seems that homework is leading to an increase in stress and anxiety, more time alone and less physical activities among young Americans

How do we solve this?

To combat workload stress, some countries, such as Finland, have cut down on homework amounts and added time for recess, while other countries, such as Italy, end school at lunchtime, according to Oxfordlearning.com.

I can’t claim to have found one perfect solution. However, I do see a concerning rise  in the amount of homework and general school work American students have been given, and a fall in the amount of time they are allotted to complete them  Potentially, teachers could hand out surveys similar to the beginning-of-the-year surveys some use to learn more about their student’s learning styles halfway through the semester to learn about the amount of time students are taking with all of their homework combined and make adjustments based on this feedback.

• mental health
• student survey

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Comments (16)

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Jay • Apr 14, 2023 at 6:18 am

homework should be ban for all students in the U.S Its really annoying and takes up our time

Boston • Sep 20, 2023 at 6:13 am

MORGZ • Jan 17, 2023 at 7:34 pm

i hate homework

Rocha • Jan 10, 2023 at 1:01 pm

I’m doing an argument that kids should have less homework.

I.P freely • Aug 11, 2022 at 9:45 pm

doing a debate on this topic waaaaa

onions have layers

Hugh • May 18, 2022 at 11:54 pm

Funny I’m doing homework about banning homework

Inleak • Mar 9, 2022 at 12:51 pm

I hate homework 🙁 🙁 🙁

Bridget • Feb 2, 2022 at 5:04 pm

funny im doing a thing to say homework is bad for homework

Tea' richardson • Feb 12, 2022 at 2:51 pm

D Hill on • Mar 9, 2022 at 12:47 pm

mountain lakes

Gabriel Ramirez • May 2, 2022 at 11:46 am

collin • Jan 13, 2022 at 10:20 am

homework is stupid and i think it should be banned from the U.S

Eleni • May 13, 2021 at 9:00 am

I HATE HOMEWORK

Boston • Sep 20, 2023 at 6:12 am

Asit • Apr 14, 2021 at 8:30 am

Give. Me homework.

gauge • Apr 8, 2022 at 1:23 pm

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Kirstie Allsopp is right – homework is a waste of time

I would rather spend the time when my children are not at school doing things we enjoy, than waste it on frustrating busywork.

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Kirstie Allsopp’s recent tweet about “the tears” and “the time together lost” over forcing her sons to do homework really resonated with me as a parent; those are the same reasons I don’t do it with my children who are eight, 10 and 13.

Property presenter Kirstie – who shares Bay Atlas, 16, and Oscar Hercules, 14, with her husband Ben Anderson, as well as two step-children from Ben’s previous relationship – said “one of her greatest regrets” was forcing her children to do homework.

I wholeheartedly agree. Homework causes unnecessary stress , invades family time and ruins weekends. I would rather spend the time when my children are not at school doing things we enjoy, not cursing my way through Sunday making a model boat, trying to print off PDFs from Microsoft Teams, or sitting down to learn about declensions.

I make sure to spend half an hour every evening reading with my younger two but that’s it. My eldest is now at the stage where he can take responsibility for his own homework and rarely asks us for help. He learned over lockdown how hopeless I was at maths and anything remotely science related, and eventually gave up on asking. I think it’s actually quite a good life lesson in self-sufficiency and responsibility.

As the daughter of a teacher, I also know how much time teachers have to spend setting and marking homework, so I do wonder who actually benefits from it. I’ve seen very little research to support the idea that it actually aids learning anyway.

Yes, giving children responsibility to manage some aspects of their own school work might help consolidate their learning and also help teach them to work towards a deadline, but trying to force tired primary school aged kids to sit down and look at spellings for half an hour a night in between dinner and bedtime just seems like work for the sake of work.

Kirstie also tweeted: “Question, real question not reason for abuse please. How much difference would it make to a teacher’s working day if the Gov said ‘from now on homework is reading only, no more written homework that needs marking etc’?”

When one follower asked her how teachers would be able to assess students, she replied: “Don’t want to cause a pile on David, but homework as a way of assessing a student?! Are you mad? Do you have any idea how much is done by parents, including GCSE coursework?”

And that’s another key point. It’s almost always the over eager parents which do most of the homework anyway, especially at primary school. It’s often more about them than the children, in my experience.

My middle child is also on the autism spectrum and trying to get him to sit down and do school work outside of school is a whole other challenge. He has quite a black and white way of looking at the world. School is where you work, home is for relaxing, Lego and Minecraft .

We learned this the hard way over lockdown and I nearly lost my sanity in the process. Homework for children with additional needs adds a whole other layer of complexity, and is another example of how a mainstream curriculum does not work for many of them. It’s not a level playing field, and a parent with one conscientious child who works part-time has much more free time than a frazzled working mother of three.

We also put my eldest through the 11 Plus – which is another thing I know can be quite divisive – and that was pretty hellish too. I have to admit I outsourced much of it to my husband, and was only really able to help out with verbal reasoning and English. He passed, by the way, so it did pay off; but I vowed not to put my youngest through anything like that again.

As Kirstie recently tweeted: “Dear God, Give me the strength to be polite & kind to all the people about to tell me their children love homework.”

Good for them, I’d say but don’t drag the rest of us who loathe the stuff into it.

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What happens if Trump is found guilty in hush money case? Prison is certainly an option.

If former President Donald Trump is convicted on all counts in his New York criminal hush money trial that began last week, he could theoretically face more than a decade in prison.

But most legal experts who spoke to USA TODAY said such a dramatic outcome is unlikely. Instead, he would likely be sentenced to something between probation and four years in prison. And he would probably still be out, free to campaign for president as the presumptive or actual 2024 Republican nominee, while his all-but-certain appeal was pending.

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Each count carries a maximum sentence of four years.

While Trump could in principle be sentenced to serve multiple counts consecutively, several experts said that is unlikely because he has no felony criminal record and the charges don't involve allegations of physical violence.

On the other hand, Trump has tested boundaries and feuded with the judge who may determine his fate.

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

Trump has antagonized Judge Juan Merchan

Trump's sentence would be decided by Judge Juan Merchan , who has grown exasperated by the former president's pretrial behavior. Merchan expanded a gag order this month after Trump attacked the judge's daughter on social media over her marketing work with Democratic candidates, including posting a photo of her. Merchan said Trump has a history of attacking the family members of judges and lawyers in his legal cases.

"The average observer, must now, after hearing Defendant's recent attacks, draw the conclusion that if they become involved in these proceedings, even tangentially, they should worry not only for themselves,  but for their loved ones as well ," Merchan wrote in his gag order decision .

John Moscow, a New York lawyer who spent 30 years in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, told USA TODAY that type of behavior could worsen any sentence Trump faces.

"If I were representing somebody in (Trump's) position, I would suggest to him that the judge is the one who imposes sentence and he ought to be careful," Moscow said.

If Merchan did consider a hefty sentence, it wouldn't be the first time he has taken a harsh view about behavior in Trump's orbit.

In 2023, Merchan was forced to sentence former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg to only five months in jail because Merchan had previously accepted a plea bargain agreement between Weisselberg and prosecutors specifying that jail term. Weisselberg pleaded guilty to tax and record falsification charges and agreed to testify against the Trump Organization at trial in order to get that sentence.

The judge said, however, that he "would be imposing a sentence much greater than that" had he not accepted the plea bargain before hearing all the evidence at the trial. Without the plea deal, Weisselberg could have faced many years in prison.

What is Trump charged with?

Trump has pleaded not guilty to all counts in the case, which focuses on whether he falsified business records to cover up reimbursements to his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels. Daniels has said she had a sexual encounter with Trump soon after Melania Trump gave birth to their son, Barron Trump. Trump denies the claim.

In order to secure felony convictions, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office must convince a 12-person jury that Trump falsified the records in order to commit or conceal another crime. In this case, Bragg argues Trump was trying to conceal a federal campaign finance law violation by falsely recording his reimbursements to Cohen as payments for legal services. The federal violation was a limit-exceeding contribution to Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, as the payment was allegedly designed to keep Daniels' story from hurting the then-Republican nominee's election prospects. Bragg also alleges Trump was trying to conceal a plan to violate New York tax and election laws.

Nothing in the Constitution prevents Trump from becoming president even if he is convicted or sentenced to prison. If he won the election, however, courts may delay any prison time until after his term in office expires .

What is the maximum possible sentence?

The 34 felony counts Trump faces are classified as "Class E felonies" under New York law – the lowest level felony in the state. The maximum penalty on each count is four years of prison, and a judge would have discretion over whether to order Trump to serve sentences on each count at the same time or one after the other. However, New York caps such sentencing for Class E felonies at 20 years .

In addition, New York judges often impose sentencing ranges, where an incarcerated person becomes eligible for parole at the low end of the range. For Class E felonies, the lowest end of a range would be one-and-a-third years per count, while the highest would be four years. Good behavior in jail or prison can speed things up even more.

A sentence limited to probation?

Merchan would also have discretion to order a fixed sentence of less than those ranges, including probation.

That's what Mitchell Epner, a New York lawyer with decades of criminal law experience, expects would happen even if Trump were convicted on all counts. Epner noted the felony charges aren't violent and don't involve drugs.

"With a defendant who has no prior criminal record, my absolute expectation would be a sentence of probation," Epner told USA TODAY.

Epner wasn't alone in thinking that could be the sentencing outcome.

"This is a case that does not involve any physical violence, and it doesn't – there's not sort of a 'named victim,' so to speak – and so the court is going to take that into consideration," Anna Cominsky, who directs the Criminal Defense Clinic at New York Law School, told USA TODAY.

"In addition, I think it is unlikely that he would be sent to prison given who he is, given both the fact that he has no criminal record, and there is no getting around the fact that he is a former president of the United States," Cominsky said.

Incarceration a real possibility

Norman Eisen, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump's first impeachment, thought a sentence that includes some incarceration is likely.

Eisen co-authored a report looking at sentencing for other defendants with no criminal history who were convicted of falsifying business records in New York. There, he noted one construction executive was sentenced in 2015 to spend two days each week in jail for a year for falsifying records to conceal payments in a bribery scheme. In 2013, two corporate executives were ordered to spend four to six months in jail for falsifying records to misclassify their salaries as expenses under their employer's larger bribery and fraud scheme.

"I think he's likely to face a sentence of incarceration if he's convicted," Eisen told USA TODAY.

Cominsky said the evidence Merchan hears at trial could also influence his thinking when it comes to sentencing.

"Often you'll hear judges refer to testimony at trial, evidence that was presented at trial, and say, 'This is why I'm imposing this sentence, because I heard from this particular witness or I saw this particular piece of evidence,'" Cominsky said.

Moscow pushed back against the assumption that Trump's sentences on each count would run simultaneously, instead of being stacked on top of each other. Just as a judge may take into account that a defendant has won a Nobel Peace Prize or lifted orphans from poverty, the judge may look at significant evidence of bad acts, Moscow said.

"When you start attacking the judge's daughter, and making her out to be a target, you have just breached the normal rules," Moscow said.

Trump has also posted a photo of himself wielding a bat, with his eyes directed toward an adjacent photo of Bragg, among other attacks on the district attorney. Bragg's office has received thousands of harassing emails, calls, and texts – including death threats – after Trump's social media attacks, it said in a court filing .

Diana Florence, a New York lawyer who spent decades in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, said Merchan's sentence would need to have some relation to what other white-collar defendants in similar cases have received, and she would be surprised if someone had ever gotten a sentencing range for falsifying business records with a minimum of 10 years or more.

Such a long sentence "would be very, very, very, very unusual, and if Judge Merchan wanted to make a point and do that, I highly doubt the appellate division would allow that to stand," she said. "It's just too much time for the conduct."

However, Florence added that a reasonable sentencing range could include a minimum period of more than a year incarcerated.

Sentencing someone with Secret Service protection?

Contemplating any jail or prison sentence would take Merchan into unchartered territory: Trump is the first former president ever criminally charged, and the Secret Service provides him with around-the-clock security.

But avoiding a sentence of incarceration on that basis risks undermining the idea of equal treatment under the law, Moscow suggested.

"If I were the judge − and I don't know what a judge would do in this case − I would reject out of hand the concept that because he was once president, and because as a matter of policy the Secret Service guards former presidents, that therefore he can't go to jail," Moscow said.

The question would then become how to reconcile equal treatment with ensuring a former president's security, according to Moscow. The judge could get creative, for example by ordering the former president to stay in a hotel wing or at a military base, where he is isolated just like any other prisoner but still has Secret Service protection.

"You can structure things to achieve the proper result without conceding that the defendant has the upper hand," Moscow said.

Chances of immediate prison? 'Less than 1%'

Many convicted defendants are "remanded" pending sentencing, a process in which they are taken into custody while they await their sentence, Florence said.

But Florence didn't expect Merchan to give that order when it comes to Trump, and even if Merchan did, Trump would likely be able to get bail set by an appeals court in the thousands of dollars to stay free during his appeal. That's all the more likely if Trump receives a low sentence, since the appeal could take longer than his actual sentence, she said.

"The chances of him going to prison immediately, even if he's convicted in whatever, six weeks from now or whenever, are I would say less than 1% because he would immediately be released on bail pending appeal," according to Florence.

Eisen agreed Trump probably wouldn't be incarcerated by Election Day, even if he's convicted on all counts.

"I think he's extremely unlikely to be forced to serve that sentence pending appeal," Eisen said.

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New International , August 1949

Leon trotsky, socialism and the family, out of socialism’s archives: a chapter from problems of life, (july 1923).

From The New International , Vol. XV No. 6 , August 1949, pp. 184–186. There is another version of this article here . Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL .

The inner relations and happenings within the family are, by their very nature, the most difficult to investigate, the least subject to statistics. It is not easy, therefore, to say in how far family ties are the more easily broken nowadays (in actual life, not merely on paper) than formerly. To a great extent we must be content to judge by the eye. The difference, moreover, between pre-revolutionary times and the present day is that formerly all the troubles and dramatic conflicts in working-class families used to pass unnoticed by the working classes themselves; whereas now, a large upper part of the workers occupy responsible posts, their life is much more in the limelight, and every domestic tragedy in their life becomes a subject of much comment and sometimes of idle gossip.

Subject to this serious reservation, there is no denying, however, that family relations, those of the proletarian class included, are shattered. This was stated as a firmly established fact in the debates of the Moscow Propagandists, and no one contested it. They were only differently impressed by it – each in his own way. Some viewed it with great misgivings, others with reserve, and others, still, seemed perplexed.  

Root of the Question

It was, anyhow, clear to all, that some big process was going on, very chaotic, assuming, alternatively, morbid or revolting, ridiculous or tragic forms, and which had not yet had time to disclose its hidden possibilities of inaugurating a new and higher order of family life. Some information about the disintegration of the family has crept into the press, but just occasionally, and in very vague, general terms.

In an article on the subject, I have read that the disintegration of the family in the working class was represented as a case of “bourgeois influence on the proletariat.” It is not so simple as this. The root of the question lies deeper and is more complicated. The influence of the bourgeois past and the bourgeois present is there, but the main process consists in a painful evolution of the proletarian family itself, an evolution leading up to a crisis, and we are witnessing now the first chaotic stages of the process.

The deeply destructive influence of the war on the family is well known. To begin with, war dissolves the family automatically, separating people for a long time or bringing people together by chance. This influence of the war was continued and strengthened by the revolution. The years of the war shattered all that had stood only by the inertia of historic tradition. They shattered the power of czardom, class privileges, the old traditional family. The revolution began by building up the new state and has achieved thereby its simplest and most urgent aim. The economic part of its problem proved much more complicated. The war shook the old economic order, the revolution overthrew it. Now we are constructing a new economic state – doing it as yet mostly from the old elements, reorganizing them in new ways.

In the domain of economics we have but recently emerged from the destructive period and begun to ascend. Our progress is still very slow, and the achievement of new socialistic forms of economic life are still very distant. But we are definitely out of the period of destruction and ruin. The lowest point was reached in the years 1920–21.

The first destructive period is still far from being over in the life of the family. The disintegrating process is still in full swing. We must bear that in mind. Family and domestic life are still passing, so to say, their 1920–21 period and have not reached the 1923 standard. Domestic life is more conservative than economic, and one of the reasons is that it is still less conscious than the latter.

In politics and economics the working class acts as a whole and pushes on to the front rank its vanguard, the communistic party accomplishing through its medium the historic aims of the proletariat.

In domestic life the working class is split into cells constituted by families. The change of political regime, the change even of the economic order of the state – the passing of the factories and mills into the hands of the workers – all this has certainly had some influence on family conditions; but only indirectly and externally, and without touching on the forms of domestic traditions inherited from the past.

A radical reform of the family and more generally of the whole order of domestic life requires a big conscious effort on the part of the whole mass of the working class and presumes in the class itself the existence of a powerful molecular force of inner desire for culture and progress.  

Equality of Sexes

A deep-going plough is needed to turn up heavy clods of soil. To institute the political equality of men and women in the Soviet State was one problem and the simplest. A much more difficult one was the next – that of instituting the industrial equality of men and women workers in the factories, the mills and the trade unions, and to do it in such a way that the men should not put the women to disadvantage. But to achieve the actual equality of man and woman within the family is an infinitely more arduous problem. All our domestic habits must be revolutionized before that can happen. And yet it is quite obvious that unless there is actual equality of husband and wife in the family, in a normal sense as well as in the conditions of life, we cannot speak seriously of their equality in social work or even in politics. As long as woman is chained to her housework, the care of the family, the cooking and sewing, all her chances of participation in social and political life are cut down to the extreme.

The easiest problem was that of assuming power. Yet just that problem alone absorbed all our forces in the early period of the revolution. It demanded endless sacrifices. The civil war necessitated measures of the utmost rigor. Narrow-minded, silly people raised cries of debased morals, of the sanguinary deprivation of the proletariat, etc., whereas what had actually happened was that the proletariat, in using the means of revolutionary violence forced into its hands, started to fight for new standards of culture, for genuine humanitarianism. In the first four or five years we have passed economically through a period of terrific breakdown. The productiveness of labor collapsed, and the products were of an appallingly low quality. Enemies saw, or chose to see, in such a situation a sign of the rottenness of the Soviet regime. In reality, however, it was but the inevitable stage of the destruction of the old economic forms, and of the first helpless attempts at the creation of new ones.

In regard to family relations, and forms of individual life in general, there must also be an inevitable period of disintegration of things as they were, of the traditions, inherited from the past, which had not passed under the control of thought. But in this domain of domestic life the period of criticism and destruction begins later, lasts very long and assumes morbid and painful forms, which, however, are complex and not always perceptible to superficial observation.

These progressive landmarks of critical change in state conditions, in economics and life in general, ought to be very clearly defined to prevent us getting alarmed by the phenomena we observed. We must learn to judge them in the right light, to understand their proper place in the development of the working class, and consciously to direct the new conditions toward socialistic forms of life.  

Tackling the ABCs

The warning is a necessary one, as we already hear voices expressing alarm. At the debate of the Moscow Propagandists some comrades spoke with great and natural anxiety of the easiness with which old family ties are broken for the sake of new ones as fleeting as the old. The victims in all cases are the mother and children.

On the other hand, who, in our midst, has not heard in private conversations complaints, not to say lamentations, about the demoralization of young Sovietists, particularly of those belonging to the Communist unions of the young – the so-called Comsomols? Not everything in these complaints is exaggeration – there is also truth in them. We certainly must – and will – fight the dark sides of this truth – this being a fight for higher culture and the ascent of human personality. But in order to begin our work, to tackle the ABC of the problem without reactionary moralizing or sentimental down-heartedness, we must first make sure of the facts and begin to see clearly what is actually happening.

Gigantic events, as we said above, have descended on the family in its old shape, the war and the revolution. And following them came creeping slowly the underground mole – critical thought, the conscious study and valuation of family relations and the forms of life. It was the mechanical force of great events combined with the critical force of the awakened mind that generated the destructive period in family relations that we are witnessing now.

The Russian worker must now, after the conquest of power, make his first conscious steps toward culture in many departments of his life. Under the impulses of great collisions, his personality shakes off for the first time all traditional forms of life, all domestic habits, church practices and relationships.

No wonder that, in the beginning, the protest of the individual, his revolt against the traditional past, is assuming anarchic, or to put it more crudely, dissolute forms. We have witnessed it in politics, in military affairs, in economics; here anarchic individualism took on every form of extremism, partisanship, public-meeting rhetoric. And no wonder also that this process reacts in the most intimate and hence most painful way on family relationships. There the awakened personality, wanting to reorganize in a new way, removed from the old beaten tracks, resorts to “dissipation,” “wickedness” and all the sins denounced in the Moscow debates.

The husband, torn away from his usual surroundings by mobilization, changed into a revolutionary citizen at the civic front. A momentous change. His outlook is wider, his spiritual aspirations higher and of a more complicated order. He is a different man. And then he returns home to find everything there practically unchanged. The old harmony and understanding with the people at home in family relationship is gone. No new understanding arises. The mutual wondering changes into mutual discontent, then into ill-will. The family is broken up.  

A Painful Process

The husband is a Communist. He lives an active life, is engaged in social work, his mind grows, his personal life is absorbed by his work. But his wife is also a Communist. She wants to join in social work, attends public meetings, works in the soviet or the union. Home life becomes practically non-existent before they are aware of it, or the missing of home atmosphere results in continual collisions. Husband and wife disagree. The family is broken up.

The husband is a Communist, the wife is non-party. The husband is absorbed by his work; the wife, as before, only looks after her home. Relations are “peaceful,” based, in fact, on customary estrangement. But the husband’s committee – the Communist “cell” – decrees that he should take away the ikons hanging in his house. He is quite willing to obey, finding it but natural. For his wife it is a catastrophe. Just such a small occurrence exposes the abyss that separates the minds of husband and wife. Relations are spoiled.

An old family. Ten to fifteen years of common life. The husband is a good worker, devoted to his family; the wife lives also for her home, giving it all her energy. But just by chance she comes in touch with a Communist women’s organization. A new world opens before her eyes. Her energy finds a new and wider object. The family is neglected. The husband is irritated. The wife is hurt in her newly awakened civic consciousness. The family is broken up.

Examples of such domestic tragedies, all leading to the one end – the breaking up of the family, could be multiplied endlessly. We have indicated the most typical cases. In all our examples the tragedy is due to a collision between Communist and non-party elements. But the breaking up of the family, that is to say, of the old-type family, is not confined to just the top of the class as the one most exposed to the influence of new conditions. The disintegrating movement in family relationships penetrates deeper. The Communist vanguard merely passes sooner and more violently through what is inevitable for the class as a whole.

The censorious attitude toward old conditions, the new claims upon the family extend far beyond the border line between the Communist and the working class as a whole. The institution of civil marriage was already a heavy blow to the traditional consecrated family which lived a great deal for appearances. The less personal attachment there was in the old marriage ties, the greater was the binding power of the external forces, social traditions, and more particularly, religious rites.

The blow to the power of the church was also a blow to the family. Rites, deprived of binding significance and of state recognition, still remain in use through inertia, serving as one of the props to the tottering family. But when there is no inner bond within the family, when nothing but inertia keeps the family itself from complete collapse, then every push from outside is likely to shatter it to pieces, while, at the same time, it is a blow at the adherence to church rites. And pushes from the outside are infinitely more likely to come now than ever before. That is the reason why the family totters and fails to recover, and then to tumble again.

Life sits in judgment on its conditions and does it by the cruel and painful condemnation of the family. History fells the old wood – and the chips fly in the wind.  

Evolving New Type

But is life evolving any elements of a new type of family? Undoubtedly. We must only conceive clearly the nature of these elements and the process of their formation. As in other cases, we must separate the physical conditions from the psychological, the general from the individual. Psychologically the evolution of the new family, of new human relationships in general, for us, means the advancement in culture of the working class, the development of the individual, a raising of the standard of his requirements and inner discipline. From this aspect, the revolution in itself has meant, of course, a big step in advance, and the worst phenomena of the disintegrating family signify merely the abnormality of the form of expression of the awakening class and individuals composing the class. All our work relating to culture, the work we are doing and the work we ought to be doing, becomes, from this aspect, a preparation for new relationships and a new family. Without a raising of the standard of the culture of the individual working man and woman, there cannot be a new, higher type for family, for, in this domain, we can only, of course, speak of inner discipline and not of external compulsion. The force then of the inner discipline of the individual in the family is conditioned by the tenor of the inner life, the scope and value of the ties that unite husband and wife.  

Elements of Progress

The physical preparations for the conditions of the new life and the new family, again, cannot fundamentally be separated from the general work of socialistic constructiveness. The workers’ state must become wealthier in order that it may be possible seriously to tackle the public education of children and the releasing of the family from the burden of the kitchen and laundry.

The socialization of family housekeeping and the public education of children are unthinkable without a marked improvement in our economics as a whole. We need more socialistic economic forms. Only under such conditions can we free the family from the functions and cares that now oppress and disintegrate it.

Washing must be done by a public laundry, catering by a public restaurant, sewing by a public workshop. Children must be educated by good public teachers who have a real vocation for the work. Then the bond between husband and wife would be freed from everything external and accidental, and the one would cease to absorb the life of the other. Genuine equality would at last be established. The bond will depend on mutual attachment. And on that account, particularly, it will acquire inner stability; not the same, of course, for everyone, but compulsory for no one.

Thus the way to the new family is twofold: (a) the raising of the standard of culture and education of the working class and the individuals composing the class; (b) an improvement in the material conditions of the class, organized by the state. The two processes are intimately connected with one another.

The above statements do not, of course, imply that at a given moment in the material betterment the family of the future will instantly step into its rights. No. A certain advance toward the new family is possible even now. it is true that the state cannot as yet undertake either the education of the children or the establishment of public kitchens, which would be an improvement on the family kitchen, or the establishment of public laundries, where the clothes would not be torn or stolen.

But this does not mean that the more enterprising and progressive families cannot group themselves even now into collective housekeeping units. Experiments of this kind must, of course, be made carefully; the technical equipment of the collective unit must answer to the interests and requirements of the group itself, and should give manifest advantages to every one of its members, even though they be modest at first.

“The task,” Comrade Semashko recently wrote on the necessity of the reconstruction of our family life, “is best performed practically; decrees and moralizing alone will have little effect. But an example, an illustration of a new form, will do more than a thousand excellent pamphlets. This practical propaganda is best conducted on the method surgeons in their practice call ‘transplantation.’ When a big surface is bare of skin either as the result of a wound or burn, and there is no hope that the skin will grow sufficiently to cover it, pieces of skin are cut off from healthy places of the body and attached in islets on the bare surface; these islets adhere and grow until the whole surface is covered with skin.”

The same thing happens in practical propaganda. When one factory or works adopts communistic forms, other factories will follow.

Such collective family housekeeping units must be carefully thought out and studied. A combination of private initiative, supported by the governing powers – in the first place, the local soviets and economic organs – must be the first step. The building of new houses – and, after all, we are going to build houses! – must be regulated by the requirements of the family group communities.

The first apparent and indisputable success in this direction, however slight and limited in extent, will inevitably arouse a desire in more widespread groups to organize life on similar lines.  

To Realm of Freedom

For a thought-out scheme, initiated from above, the time is not yet ripe, either from the point of view of the material resources of the state, or from that of the preparation of the proletariat itself. We can escape the deadlock at present only by the creation of model communities.

The ground beneath our feet must be strengthened step by step; there must be no rushing too far ahead, or lapsing into bureaucratic fanciful experiments. At a given moment, the state will be able, with the help of local soviets, co-operative units and so on, to socialize the work done, to widen and deepen it. In this way the human family, in the words of Engels, will “jump from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.”

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Last updated on 29 September 2018

The Moscow Trials

Part One: The Moscow Frame-Up Trials: 'Shoot the mad dogs!'

The ideas of Trotsky - which represent the continuation of Marxist thought since Lenin's death - are without question the most slandered set of ideas in history.

Together with Marx and Lenin, Trotsky has been subjected to a continual onslaught from capitalist commentators and academics, including the Russian 'democrats' of the Volkogonov type, for his alleged totalitarianism and subversive ideas. In reality, it is the revolutionary message of Marxism which poses a threat to their system - and they must attempt to discredit these ideas at every opportunity.

Added to this orchestrated bourgeois campaign of vilification has been the vitriolic attacks of the Stalinists on Trotsky. Before his death, Lenin formed a block with Trotsky to remove Stalin from office. Unfortunately, a series of strokes removed Lenin from political life until his death in 1924. From then on Trotsky led the struggle against Stalin and the emerging bureaucracy within the USSR. With the failure of revolution abroad, Stalin used his support within the apparatus to isolate and expel Trotsky from the Soviet Union.

Once Stalin had defeated Trotsky's Left Opposition, he turned on all his opponents, including his allies on the Right. The victory of the apparatus was to culminate in the infamous Moscow Trials of 1936-38 where the 'Old Bolsheviks', including Trotsky, who led the October Revolution, were accused of counter-revolutionary activity, sabotage, murder, and collaboration with fascism.

Most of the accused were subsequently broken by the secret police, the NKVD, forced to give to give false confessions about themselves and others, and then shot. By 1940, out of the members of Lenin's Central Committee of 1917, only Stalin remained. Trotsky himself was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in August 1940.

In the course of these Show Trials, Stalin attempted to mobilise world opinion against the accused. An international campaign was organised through the Communist Parties and their press to discredit and slander Trotsky and the other leaders of the Revolution. Trotsky was officially accused of being connected with the German Intelligence Service since 1921, and with British intelligence since 1926!

In the Indictment of the trial of the Old Bolsheviks Pyatakov, Radek, Sokolnikov, Serebriakov, Muralov and others, it states:

'The investigation has established that LD Trotsky entered into negotiations with one of the leaders of the German National Socialist Party with a view to waging a joint struggle against the Soviet Union... The principles of this agreement, as Trotsky related, were finally elaborated and adopted during Trotsky's meeting with Hitler's deputy, Hess...' (International Press Correspondence, p. 128, no 6, February 1937)

While the Moscow Frame up Trials unfolded, very few were to openly question their authenticity. While the charges appeared fantastic, the confessions seemed so clear and emphatic. In the West, a handful of Trotskyists fought bravely to mobilise opposition to the Stalinist machine. In 1937, an impartial Commission of Enquiry was established, made up of liberal-democratic people, under Prof. John Dewey to examine the charges made against Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov - the two principal defendants of the Moscow Trials. After a thorough investigation the Commission returned a verdict of not guilty and that the trials were a frame-up.

It was only in 1956, at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, did Khrushchev finally reveal that the Trials were in fact fame-ups. This was done to place the blame for the crimes of Stalinism on Stalin himself. It was all down to him! The fact that Khrushchev and the others directly participated in the frame-ups while Stalin was alive was not mentioned. Neither Trotsky nor his son were rehabilitated. Despite the so-called de-Stalinisation, research into the Great Terror was taboo right up until the end of the 1980s.

With the collapse of Stalinism, and the opening up of the archives of the CPSU, new evidence has emerged about the Moscow Trials. One of the latest books to appear which analyses the new archive material from a Marxist perspective is '1937: Stalin's Year of Terror' by the Russian historian Vadim Z. Rogovin. This excellent book provides a graphic picture of the horrific preparation of the Trials.

The Great Purge and Terror were launched by Stalin not because he was insane. On the contrary, it was a conscious, well-prepared course of action to safe-guard the rule of the bureaucracy. Stalin arrived at the decision to destroy the 'Old Bolsheviks' not later than the summer of 1934, and then began to prepare his operation - beginning with the murder of Kirov in December of that year.

Trotsky explained Stalin's actions:

'It is time, my listeners, it is high time, to recognise, finally, that a new aristocracy has been formed in the Soviet Union. The October Revolution proceeded under the banner of equality. The bureaucracy is the embodiment of monstrous inequality. The revolution destroyed the nobility. The bureaucracy creates a new gentry. The revolution destroyed titles and decorations. The new aristocracy produces marshals and generals. The new aristocracy absorbs an enormous part of the national income. Its position before the people is deceitful and false. Its leaders are forced to hide the reality, to deceive the masses, to cloak themselves, calling black white. The whole policy of the new aristocracy is a frame-up.'

The situation by 1934 was giving rise for alarm amongst the Stalinist bureaucracy. There was profound discontent throughout the country after the debacle of forced collectivisation and the adventure of the first Five Year Plan. Opposition moods were wide-spread. Stalin feared that the Old Bolsheviks - although forced to repeatedly capitulate to Stalin - would become a focal point for opposition. Some had in fact made contact with Trotsky in exile.

Stalin used the assassination of Kirov to launch his plans. Originally the perpetrators of the murder were declared to be a group of 13 'Zinovievists', shot in December 1934. The former oppositionists Zinoviev and Kamenev - who had had earlier broken with Trotsky and capitulated - were then convicted in January 1935 with 'objectively' inflaming terrorist moods amongst their supporters. But this was only the beginning.

Stalin now realised his mistake in exiling Trotsky in 1928, which allowed him to freely criticise the Stalinist regime from abroad. Trotsky was the most important focal point of opposition to Stalin. He was a revolutionary leader that would not be broken. From then on Stalin prepared his assassination. Consequently, Stalin set about the fame-up of Trotsky and his supporters on charges of terrorism.

This job was given to the NKVD under Yagoda and then Yezhov, both Stalinist hangmen. They had to 'prove' the existence of an underground terrorist Zinoviev organisation which collaborated with secret Trotskyist network. In early 1935 a directive was given to the NKVD which demanded the 'total liquidation of the entire Trotsky-Zinoviev underground'. Arrests took place of suspected oppositionists and former-oppositionists. Then followed the interrogations and first 'confessions' - receiving terrorist orders from Trotsky.

After a year and a half in prison, Zinoviev and Kamenev were brought to Moscow for their interrogation. They had been repeatedly broken - morally crushed - by this time. As was Stalin's method, he had managed to sow mutual discord between the two men. Zinoviev wrote Stalin grovelling letters from his cell: 'My soul burns with one desire: to prove to you that I am no longer an enemy. There is no demand which I would not fullfil in order to prove this... ' (Rogovin, p. 5)

Kamenev bore himself with particular courage. He told his interrogator: 'You are now observing Thermidor in a pure form. The French Revolution taught us a good lesson, but we weren't able to put it to use. We don't know how to protect our revolution from Thermidor. That is our greatest mistake, and history will condemn us for it.'

Yezhov was ordered to prepare them for a public trial, and that they should slander themselves and Trotsky - for the sake of the revolution! Threats were made against their families, a number of whom were held by the NKVD. They were incarcerated and subjected to humiliating procedures. Zinoviev was the first to break, who then persuaded Kamenev to follow suite in return for their lives and those of their families and supporters. They were then brought before Stalin and Voroshilov. Zinoviev pleaded with them: 'You want to depict members of Lenin's Politburo and Lenin's personal friends to be unprincipled bandits, and present the party as a snake's nest of intrigue, treachery and murderers.' To this Stalin replied that the Trial was not aimed at them, but against Trotsky, 'the sworn enemy of the Party.'

Their pleas for their lives were met with Stalin's vow that all this 'goes without saying.' Stalin betrayed them, as he would betray the rest. It was in reality a betrayal of the Revolution in the interests of the ruling bureaucracy at whose head was Stalin.

Smirnov and Mrachkovsky both stubbornly refused to give confessions to the interrogators. According to the chief prosecutor, Vyshinsky, Smirnov's entire interrogation on 20 May consisted of his words: 'I deny this. I deny it once again. I deny it.' Mrachkovsky was taken before Stalin personally, but rejected his advances. He was then handed over to Slutsky, head of the NKVD's foreign department. According to him, he interrogated Mrachkovsky non-stop for almost four days. Mrachkovsky told Slutsky: 'You can tell Stalin that I hate him. He is a traitor. They took me to Molotov, who also wanted to buy me off. I pit in his face.' During the interrogation every two hours the phone rang from Stalin's secretary to ask whether he had managed to 'break' Mrachkovsky. After a lengthy interrogation he finally broke down in tears 'concluding everything was lost.' For a long time he refused to smear Trotsky with terrorist activity.

The first show Trial - the Trial of the Sixteen - sought to destroy the mythical Trotsky-Zinoviev Centre. Vyshinsky did not provide a shred of evidence against the accused - not one document, not a scrap of paper - only the confessions of the accused. The weakness of the prosecutor's case was demonstrated by the inconsistencies and falsehoods in the testimonies given at the trial. Goltsmam, for instance, testified he met Trotsky and Sedov in Copenhagen at the Hotel Bristol. Unbeknown to the prosecutors, the Hotel Bristol had been demolished in 1917! The Stalinist investigators had not done their homework.

At the conclusion of the Trial, Vyshinsky for the prosecution declared: 'I demand that we shoot the mad dogs - every single one of them!' Despite the pleas for mercy submitted by the Sixteen - which they were led to believe would be honoured - within a matter of hours they were taken out and shot.

Those who grovelled before the Stalinist dictatorship - throwing all kinds of slanders against their former comrades - could never satisfy Stalin. They would be eliminated after their allotted role was complete. New amalgams were being prepared. New Witch Trials would take place. As Leon Sedov explained: 'Stalin needs Trotsky's head - this is his main goal. To achieve it he will launch the most extreme and even more insidious cases.'

With the collapse of Hitler Germany in 1945 and the Nuremberg Trials, which laid bare the Nazi regime and their collaborators, not one word or document was found to prove the slightest connection between Trotsky and the Gestapo. It was not Trotsky who had an agreement with Hitler. It was Stalin who signed a Pact with Hitler in August 1939.

It is fitting to end this article by a quote from Leopold Trepper, the leader of the famous anti-Nazi spy network in Western Europe:

'But who did protest at the time? Who rose up to voice his outrage? The Trotskyites can lay claim to this honour. Following the example of their leader, who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice-axe, they fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did.

'Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not 'confess', for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.'

Part Two: The Moscow Trials - the greatest frame-up in history

"Why does Moscow so fear the voice of a single man? Only because I know the truth, the whole truth. Only because I have nothing to hide. Only because I am ready to appear before a public and impartial commission of inquiry with documents, facts, and testimonies in my hands, and to disclose the truth to the very end. I declare: if this commission decides that I am guilty in the slightest degree of the crimes which Stalin imputes to me, I pledge in advance to place myself voluntarily in the hands of the executioners of the G.P.U. That, I hope, is clear. Have you all heard? I make this declaration before the entire world. I ask the press to publish my words in the farthest corners of the planet. But if the commission establishes - do you hear me? - that the Moscow Trials are a conscious and premeditated frame-up, constructed with the bones and nerves of human beings, I will not ask my accusers to place themselves voluntarily before a firing squad. No, the eternal disgrace in the memory of human generations will be sufficient for them! Do the accusers of the Kremlin hear me? I throw my defiance in their faces. And I await their reply!" From Trotsky's summary speech before the Dewey Commission, April 1937.

In August 1936, the Old Bolsheviks Kamenev, Zinoviev, Smirnov, Mrachkovsky and twelve others were framed by Stalin, forced to confess to crimes they had not committed, and shot. In January 1937, other leading Bolsheviks, including Piatakov, Radek, Sokolnikov and Muralov, were also framed and either shot or murdered. In June 1937, Marshal Tukhachevsky and a group of the highest-ranking Red Army generals were executed. Finally, in March 1938, Bukharin, Rykov, Krestinsky, and others were also convicted of counter-revolution and shot. The men in the dock were all members of Lenin's Political Bureau, except for Stalin. Trotsky, though absent, was the chief defendant. They were all accused for plotting to assassinate Stalin and the other Soviet leaders, to wreck the country, and conspiring with the espionage services of Britain, France, Japan and Germany. They were also accused of entering into secret pacts with Hitler and the Mikado to annex vast slices of Soviet territory.

The frame-up trials were accompanied by a prolonged purge running into millions. Many victims were executed without trial because they refused to bear false witness. The forced confessions of the defendants in the public trials were the only basis for the proceedings and verdicts. Trotsky alone was beyond Stalin's reach and could not be silenced. At every turn, he denounced the monstrous actions of the Stalinist regime.

At the same time, the Communist Parties everywhere churned out propaganda against Trotsky and in favour of the trials. It was especially taken up with zeal by the British Stalinists. R. Page Arnot wrote in Labour Monthly: "Trotskyism is now revealed as an ancillary of fascism." Walter Holmes in the Daily Worker (4/9/36) wrote: "What are you worrying about? Everybody in our party has got enough sense to know they ought to be shot." John Gollan wrote a pamphlet entitled The Development of Trotskyism from Menshevism to Alliance with Fascism and Counter-revolution. The pro-Stalinist D. N. Pritt, KC wrote: "Once again, the more faint-hearted socialists are beset with doubts and anxieties," but "once again we can feel confident that when the smoke has rolled away from the battle-field of controversy it will be realised that the charge was true, the confessions correct, and the prosecution fairly conducted."

Meanwhile in Russia, the Stalinist regime was trampling over the corpses of the Old Bolsheviks. On 10 August 1936, Yezhov, a leading figure in the secret police, showed Piatakov the testimony given against him, pushing him to a nervous breakdown. Attempting to defend himself, Piatakov blamed the 'Trotskyists' for spreading slanders about him. Calling himself guilty of "not paying attention to counter-revolutionary work of his former wife, and of being indifferent to meetings with her acquaintances", Piatakov said he should be punished more severely, and asked "that he be granted any form of rehabilitation." With this in mind, he asked the CC "allow him personally to shoot all those sentenced to be shot in the (forthcoming) trial, including his former wife." He requested that a statement about this be published in the press.

"In reporting these events at the December Plenum of the Central Committee in 1936", writes Vadim Rogovin in his excellent book, 1937 - Stain's Year of Terror, "Stalin stated that Piatakov had prepared 'with pleasure' to play the role of prosecutor. 'But when we thought things over and decided that this wouldn't work. What would it mean to present him as public prosecutor? He would say one thing, and the accused would object by saying: "Look where you've managed to crawl, into the prosecutor's chair. But didn't you used to work with us?!" And what would that lead to? It would turn the trial into a comedy and disrupt the trial.'" (Rogovin, p. 69)

On the one hand, this showed how broken Piatakov had become, desperate to escape his inevitable end. He prostrated himself before Stalin. His plea to be allowed to become prosecutor was even cynically considered by Stalin but then rejected, fearing it would bring the trial into disrepute.

Stalin then coolly considered Piatakov's request to personally shoot the defendants, including his former wife, but then thought it unwise: "If we announce it, no one would believe that we hadn't forced him to do it. We said that this wouldn't work, no one would believe that you voluntarily decided to do this, without being coerced. Yes, and besides, we never have announced the names of the people who carry out sentences." (Quoted in Rogovin, p. 70).

When Tomsky's name was mentioned in Pravda, connected to the "Trotsky-Zinoviev Gang", he shot himself. He left a note to Stalin: "I never joined any conspiracy against the party." The interrogation of Radek, Skolnikov and Piatakov served to blacken their names. They admitted to the existence of the mythical 'centre' that Trotsky was supposed to have used to organise terrorism inside the USSR. At their trial they were found guilty. Piatakov was shot, and Radek and Skolnikov were imprisoned - and finally murdered in 1939 by other prisoners, apparently on the orders from the security organs.

At the beginning of 1935, Trotsky's son Sergei Sedov was arrested and sent into exile to the Vorkuta camps. New charges were brought against him for allegedly poisoning workers. He was sentenced to be shot on 29 October 1937. All of Trotsky's family - at least those the authorities could discover - were subsequently arrested. "The very sound of his name - Trotsky! - aroused a mystical horror in the hearts of the contemporaries of the Great Purge," notes Runin, the brother-in-law of Sergei. "And the fact that my sister had some kind of relation to that name automatically turned not only her, but our entire family, into state criminals, 'collaborators', 'spies', 'accomplices', in short, into 'agents of the greatest villain of modern times, into the most vicious opponent of Soviet power.'" (Quoted by Rogovin, pp. 152-53).

While there were those who confessed to crimes they did not commit under lengthy interrogation, there were many who did not. Most were shot. Some survived, such as D. B. Dobrushkin, an engineer in Moscow. He passed through a two-year investigation, during which he lost the sight in one eye. He was finally released in Beria's 'reverse flood'.

The witch-hunt atmosphere affected everyone, even the most fervent Stalinists. Ordzhonikidze, for example, committed suicide in early 1937, after constant harrassment from Beria of the G.P.U. In February-March, at the Plenum of the CC, a case was constructed again Bukharin and Rykov. They were forced to grovel before their tormentors. When Bukharin apologised for his political short-sightedness, Stalin interrupted "That's not enough, that's not enough!" He then begged the "CC once again to forgive me." After four days of interrogation, both Bukharin and Rykov were in a state of extreme exhaustion and despair. In the course of their speeches they were constantly interrupted and barracked. After Bukharin had spoken, there were shouts from the audience: "He should have been put in prison long ago!" Stalin urged them to "cleanse themselves" by testifying against themselves and others.

Stalin's agents were also busy internationally exposing Trotskyist "counter-revolutionaries." In Spain the G.P.U. under Alexander Orlov carried out reprisals and assassinations of Trotskyists and the anti-Stalinlists of the POUM. This included Trotsky's secretary in Norway, Erwin Wolf, and the POUM leader Nin, who was mercilessly tortured and his body secretly disposed of. In 1937, Ignace Reiss, a G.P.U. agent, publically broke from the Stalin and came over to Trotsky. He was hunted down and murdered. In 1938, Trotsky's son, Leon Sedov, was also murdered in Paris. In the same year, the decapitated body of Rudolf Klement - the movement's international secretary - was found in the river Seine. The net was closing in.

Trotsky knew his life was in constant danger. Trotsky would tell Natalia, "We have been spared another day." It was Trotsky's hope to be granted sufficient time to allow him to develop and educate a new cadre for the revolutionary events that would unfold during and after the war. Trotsky embodied the genuine traditions of revolutionary Marxism. For this reason, he was a deadly threat to Stalin. The discontent within the USSR, together with the revolutionary events in Spain, threatened to revive opposition within the country. That is why he launched the Purge trials. All potential opposition had to be eliminated.

Trotsky himself was assassinated by a Stalinist agent on 20th August 1940. But to kill a man, is not to kill his ideas. Stalinism has collapsed in the ex-Soviet Union. The Stalinist bureaucracy has gone over - as Trotsky had predicted - to the capitalist counter-revolution. The ranks of the Communist Parties internationally are in ferment. They have never been so open to Trotsky's ideas. The development of powerful Marxist currents world-wide now falls on the new generation of workers and youth. Trotsky has bequeathed a treasure house of ideas, which can help us in our task. A new period opens up before us of revolution and counter-revolution. On the basis of events, the traditional organisations of the working class will be transformed and re-transformed and open the way for the creation of mass Marxist tendencies internationally.

Trotsky was to defend his honour and faith in the socialist future of humankind to the bitter end. It was essential to maintain the spotless banner of revolutionary socialism.

"We will not hand this banner to the masters of falsification", stated Trotsky. "If our generation has proven to be too weak to establish socialism on this earth, we will give its unstained banner to our children. The struggle which looms ahead by far supersedes the significance of individual people, factions and parties. It is a struggle for the future of all humanity. It will be severe. It will be long. Whoever seeks physical repose and spiritual comfort - let him step aside. During times of reaction it is easier to lean on the bureaucracy than on the truth. But for all those for whom socialism is not an empty phrase but the content of their moral life - forward! Neither threats, nor persecution, nor violence will stop us. Perhaps it will be on our bones, but the truth will triumph. We are paving the way for it, and the truth will be victorious. Under the terrible blows of fate I will feel as happy as during the best days of my youth if I can join you in facilitating its victory. For, my friends, the highest human happiness lies not in the exploitation of the present, but in the preparation of the future."

Rob Sewell London March 2000 (this two-part article appeared first in Socialist Appeal )

• 'The Case of Leon Trotsky' Report of Hearings on the Charges Made Against Him in the Moscow Trials, Verbatim Transcript of Trotsky's Testimony Before the Dewey Commission, Coyoacan, Mexico, April 10-17, 1937 published by Merit Publishers, New York Note: unfortunately this book is out of print, but can probably be found in a well stocked library
• 'Not Guilty' A companion volume to the above publication, a complete report of the findings of the Commission, published by Pathfinder, can be ordered from WellRed Books
• '1937: Stalin's year of terror' by Vadim Rogovin, published by Mehring Books, has recently come out and is also a very good account of Stalin's frame-up trials. Can be ordered from WellRed Books (�19.99 sterling)
• The Moscow Trial by Max Shachtman, concentrates on the 1936 trials.
• The Red Book by Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son. This is available and can be ordered from WellRed Books (�3.95 sterling). This is a good short account in which Sedov exposes the Moscow Trials.

[ Back to 2000 Trotsky Year]

K ievan Rus' struggled on into the 13th century, but was decisively destroyed by the arrival of a new invader--the Mongols. In 1237 Batu Khan, a grandson of Jenghiz Khan, launched an invasion into Kievan Rus' from his capital on the lower Volga (at present-day Kazan). Over the next three years the Mongols (or Tatars) destroyed all of the major cities of Kievan Rus' with the exceptions of Novgorod and Pskov. The regional princes were not deposed, but they were forced to send regular tribute to the Tatar state, which became known as the Empire of the Golden Horde. Invasions of Russia were attempted during this period from the west as well, first by the Swedes (1240) and then by the Livonian Brothers of the Sword (1242), a regional branch of the fearsome Teutonic Knights. In the best news of the era for Russia, both were decisively defeated by the great warrior Alexander Nevsky, a prince of Novgorod who earned his surname from his victory over the Swedes on the Neva River.

For the next century or so, very little seems to have happened in Russia. In fact, given the tribute demanded by the Tatars, there wasn't much money available for building, campaigns, or anything else of that sort. With the Tatars off to the southwest, the northeastern cities gradually gained more influence--first Tver, and then, around the turn of the 14th century, Moscow. As a sign of the city's importance, the patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church was transferred to the city, making it the spiritual capital of Russia. By the latter part of the century, Moscow felt strong enough to challenge the Tatars directly, and in 1380 a Muscovite prince named Dmitri Donskoy had the audacity to attack them. His decisive victory at Kulikovo Field immediately made him a popular hero, though the Tatar retaliation two years later maintained their rule over the city. It wasn't until 1480, after another century had passed, that Moscow was strong enough to throw off Tatar rule for good. Its ruler at that time was Grand Duke Ivan III, better known as Ivan the Great. Ivan began by subjugating most of Moscow's rival cities, and by the time he tore up the charter binding it to Tatar tribute he was effectively in control of the entire country. However, it wasn't until the reign of his grandson, Ivan IV (the Terrible), that Russia became a unified state.

Ivan the Terrible succeeded his father Vasily III as Grand Duke of Moscow in 1533 at the age of three. His mother served as regent until she too died, when Ivan was eight. For the next eight years, the young Grand Duke endured a series of regents chosen from among the boyars (the nobility). Finally in 1547, he adopted the title of tsar and set about crushing the power of the boyars, reorganizing the military, and preparing to smite the Tatars. In 1552 he conquered and sacked Kazan, and in 1556 Astrakhan, having thus destroyed the lingering power of the Golden Horde. Ivan's Tatar campaigns opened vast new areas for Russian expansion, and it was during his reign that the conquest and colonization of Siberia began.

Believe it or not, Ivan was not supposed to have been very terrible at all during the early years of his reign. However, as he grew older his temper worsened, and by the 1560s he carried out a pretty horrific campaign against the boyars, confiscating their land and executing or exiling those who displeased him. In 1581, in a rage, he struck his son and heir Ivan with an iron rod, killing him.

When Ivan the Terrible died in 1584, he was succeeded by his son Fyodor, who was not exactly up to filling the shoes of an autocratic legend. Fyodor left most of the management of the kingdom to his brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, and it was not long before Godunov began to work to secure the succession for himself. In 1591, he murdered Fyodor's younger brother Dmitri in the ancient town of Uglich, a spot now marked by the magnificent Church of St. Demetrius on the Blood. When Fyodor died in 1598, Godunov was made tsar, but his rule was never accepted as entirely legitimate. Within a few years a pretender arose in Poland, claiming to be Dmitri, and in 1604 he invaded Russia. Godunov died suddenly the next year, and the "Time of Troubles" began. For the next eight years both the first and a second false Dmitri laid claims to the throne, both supported by invading Polish armies. Finally, in 1613, the Poles were ousted from Moscow, and the boyars unanimously elected Michael Romanov as Tsar. The Romanov dynasty was to rule Russia for the next 304 years, until the Russian Revolution brought an end to the Tsarist state.

Ancient Russia | The Mongols & the Emergence of Moscow | The Romanovs | Napoleon's Invasion | The Path to Revolution | The Soviet Era