These can be two different things:
1. Constructive help from parents has (at least) two components. First, it shows your child you care. This may seems small, but it’s not. Second, and I think this is what a lot of HNers would appreciate, is to help your child to develop good processes. There is a lot that goes into this, and it can be parent-centered or child-centered, but having your child reflect on process and (ideally) implement some good processes can really set them up for later in life. Imho, parents should have to write a short narrative about what involvement they had in their child’s project, if any. This is required at some of the local schools where I live.
2. Having the parents do the project for the child is just silly. Most decent teachers can see through this (assuming they care). Congrats to the adult parent for winning elementary school or middle school as an adult. :-/
My memory of being a kid is that I could not count on my parents to do something I needed. I probably could not have gotten that short narrative from my parents and all it would say if either actually did it was “I didn’t help.”
So, on the one hand, as an honest parent I find such a requirement boundary crossing and a(nother) waste of my time; time I could spend doing something meaningful with my kid. On the other hand, as a former kid, I find the requirement a dealbreaker and I wouldn’t have even tried. Meanwhile, dishonest people are just going to write dishonest narratives.
In practice, what happened was that after we had done our hours, they asked us to do more hours. We said no. Then they cajoled us. We said no. They then essentially harassed us and implied we didn't care about our child if we didn't do more hours. We said no, but this still went on for awhile. You can't escape them either. Even after they stop calling, they gossip about you and get passive aggressive at events. I talked to some parents of older kids and was told that the volunteer organizers only ever bother the parents who actually volunteer. They don't bother with the ones who never do their hours because they figure they never will. So these parents just stopped volunteering altogether. After a couple years of this, I followed their lead.
Second,
The school my child attended was in the same physical building and had the same administration as another school. The two schools used different teaching methods. The population of the school my child attended was about 30% of the population of the larger school. Both schools were neighborhood schools. If you lived in the neighborhood and applied, you got into my kid's school. If you didn't apply, you got into the larger school. If you lived outside the neighborhood you could apply for either school, and IIRC, you got in through a lottery process and only if there was room. In practice, no one ever applied for the larger of the neighborhood schools, only my kid's school. Most people just didn't apply, so my kid's school was smaller and about 30% of those kids were from outside the neighborhood.
Each school had its own PTA. At one point, the larger school's PTA approached our PTA about merging into a single organization. It made a lot of sense on paper, especially since there were "all schools" events. So it happened. The president of the larger school's PTA stayed president. Her first act was to send out a letter to all the parents talking about the merger. It also talked about "putting an end to the special treatment of a select few." In other words, our kids weren't going to get their school-specific field trips that were made possible by our volunteer hours and other fundraisers.
The subsequent meeting was eye-opening. They talked as if the kids' of the smaller school were all little Gates, Zuckerbergs, and Musks, even though most of us lived in the same neighborhood and I only knew of one family with any significant money. Most of these people were wealthier than me just by virtue of owning property in the Bay. We lived in an apartment with rent we could barely afford that was larger than a lot of these people's mortgage payments.
What we thought was going to happen is we were going to merge our PTA's hard-fought opportunities with their sheer number of parents to raise more funds for everyone. What they thought was that we had more money because we were rich and it wasn't fair and they were going to take it and give it to their kids.
I have seen this most with larger projects, and usually the student was encouraged to seek outside expertise (just like one would do in real life).
The only catch was that the assistance from the outside sources needed to be documented.
For teens, they can do the documentation themselves. For younger children, a short note from a parent is adequate. If this is a burden to the parent, then I think there are probably some other issues involved.
I entered the science fair as a kindergartner with a poster project explaining how (the output color-mixing of a) color TV worked.
Principal accused my parents of doing it; they had no idea what he was talking about and protested that I’d done it. So he interviewed me about it and left convinced I’d done it. ;)
When in doubt, a simple question like “why did you choose this topic?” or “what was the hardest part of this project?” will usually make clear the driving force behind the project. Some younger kids will just blatantly admit that their parents did the project (sometimes/often to the child’s dismay).
I had an english teacher in college accuse me of cheating. Well accused me in a roundabout way. My paper was on psychosurgery, and violent criminals. He said he needed to ask his girfriend, who had MFCC, how to pronounce amygdala. From then on I dumbed down my papers for him. I would purposely use a bunch of semicolons, and dashes.
I loved to write until I had that guy as a teacher.
Like heck I'm gonna sit there writing short narratives for some school. Homework stops at the kids.
I think the big part is to be a mentor. Just asking questions like 'did you think about x', or 'how do you plan to handle y' can have a huge impact by making them think further into the plan without just handing them answers. In my opinion, having them think about the possible outcomes and then search out additional information is really what school is supposed to be about.
What you call constructive help is literally parent organizing and guiding whole thing. If that is what homework project becomes, then it should not be homework at all. It should be in-class experiment, because it so far from being autonomous kids activity.
> Imho, parents should have to write a short narrative about what involvement they had in their child’s project, if any. This is required at some of the local schools where I live.
Personally, I think that homework should be within kids abilities scope - including attention span, access to materials and ability to organize.
