If your child has help from a paraprofessional at school, you may worry about too much help being given in academics -- you want someone to strengthen your child's ability to do the work, not do the work for them. Unfortunately, paras are often not giving any sort of training in instructional assistance, and have to fall back on the same kind of skills parents have for urging kiddos toward the right answer. As parents who help with homework a lot know too well, it's hard not to just take over.
That's something I've struggled with a lot with my kids, especially when it comes to writing. Putting words together well is what I do for a living, but it's a talent I've always had, and not one I can explain in a way that helps my language-challenged kids magically create lovely essays. To resist my urge to just dictate something acceptable, I developed some techniques that help them break the daunting task of writing down into little pieces, do each of those tiny tasks, and then fit them back together like a jigsaw puzzle.
If you also struggle to guide your kids' writing assignments without writing them yourself, check my how-tos for creating a paragraph, an essay, or a research paper, and some tips for avoiding plagiarism too. The result may not be as good as you could have made it, but at least no one will wonder who really did the work.
Photo by Terri Mauro