Some things in life we know aren't especially good for us, yet we still struggle to imagine life without them. Dr. Kathy joked about peanut M&M’s, which is a harmless enough picture of the tension, but families can experience the same thing in a much more formative way with screens. Summer gets busy, routines loosen, bedtime shifts, meals become less predictable, and suddenly a movie at night, some tablet time, a digital chess game, or a few extra hours of gaming starts to feel like part of the normal rhythm. In our house, we had some of that this summer, and then school started, and the limits tightened almost overnight. What followed wasn't a dramatic family crisis, but a noticeable layer of irritability and restlessness that made me wonder whether we had underestimated how much stimulation our kids had grown accustomed to.

Homework has an unusual ability to change the emotional temperature of a house. A perfectly reasonable evening can shift from dinner to tension in about three minutes when someone remembers there is still a math page in the backpack, spelling that hasn’t been touched, and a child needs a ruler that apparently disappeared sometime during the previous administration. Parents get frustrated, kids get discouraged, siblings get pulled into the chaos, and suddenly the family spends the end of the day fighting about school. That is why I appreciated something Dr. Kathy said in our recent Celebrate Kids Podcast conversation: homework is not automatically good simply because it is homework. If it will take time away from family, play, rest, church, chores, and relationships, it should be doing something worthwhile.

There are moments as a parent when I would really prefer the system to be simple. I give the instruction, the child follows it, everybody moves on, and somewhere an imaginary parenting scoreboard adds a point next to my name. “Put your shoes away.” Done. “Come to dinner.” Done. “Stop arguing with your brother.” Done. The problem is that children are people, which means obedience is rarely just about whether the instruction was clear.