Dear Ruby,
My wife and I still have our jobs, but we’re putting in longer hours. I used to get home and help my daughter with her homework, but now sometimes it’s too late, and her math grades are starting to slip a little. She’s old enough to stay home alone, but school is hard for her and I think she gets frustrated and just blows through it so she can watch TV. I can’t spend too much time on the phone with her after school either, and right now there’s no money for a tutor. Can you help us get her through the rest of the school year?

Thanks, Tony

Tony,
As a former latchkey kid, I look back fondly on the hours I spent between 3 and 6, making popcorn and chocolate milk, watching M.A.S.H., doing my homework, losing my virginity. Good times. But then again, I did flunk algebra.

Every time a parent gets busier doing non-parent stuff, it’s necessary to ramp up the organizing. A few steps should make you feel more on top of this situation.

1. Call her teacher(s), especially for classes she has a hard time with and explain your situation. Would he/she send you an email alert if homework quality dips below a certain level? How about a promise to send all graded work home on Fridays? 
2. Create an after-school schedule. Snack, homework, chore, playtime. If you know what she’s doing and when, maybe that’s when you can schedule a productive 15 minute phone call and get caught up. 
3. Check homework when you do get home, with or without her. Don’t correct it, but make a few notes to yourself on what’s happening and whether she’s getting it.

None of this solves the actual doing of homework, but today’s kids have a few more options than I did. For example, on YouTube you can watch adorable puppies and gory skateboard accidents AND you can learn how to divide fractions. Some nice person out there makes these extremely useful math videos that not only help your child, but they’re a great face-saving tool for adults who couldn’t do 5th grade math if you held a gun to their heads. There are a million links out there to free worksheets, free tutorials, free quizzes, and free homework hotlines, even.

So, hook her up with some of these. You’ll have to trust her online, so set up some rules and post them by the computer. For best results, tell her you can find out everything she views online, whether it’s true or not. And then,

4. Give up a little bit of weekend. After a good breakfast, bring the daughter and her previous week’s homework to a quiet coffee shop where you can spend 1 or 2 hours away from the laundry and the football game and everything else you want to do during your precious little time at home. It shouldn’t cost more than a coffee and a Coke and may end up being some of your favorite memories.

By the way, this is advice for a kid who just needs some extra help, not a kid who needs a diagnosis. If there’s more going on here than your coaching can fix, then ask her teacher or pediatrician and maybe start checking out sites for this sort of thing, like Mel Levine’s All Kinds of Minds website.

Good luck, Tony, and if your jobs seem pretty secure, maybe think about that tutor. There are lots of families out there that could use a little extra income.

The rest of you? Write Ruby. What else? 

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