Is Busy Work the Price to Pay for Good Grades?

Even if busy work is the price to pay for good grades, is it worth paying?

A lot of the homework coming home these days seems to be busy work. I have a child who HATES busy work. He has always dragged his feet doing homework, dawdling for hours over what in my mind could have been accomplished in 20 minutes, and I have never understood why he had to make it so painful rather than just getting it done. But more and more, I am beginning to wonder if maybe there is another side to it. Maybe he has never understood why I insisted on him doing it in the first place?  A little story he told me recently, to illustrate this point:

Are our Kids Becoming Too ENTITLED?

I’ve grappled with this issue for quite some time. I’m still not sure there is a conclusive answer to this question, but the following is an article I recently wrote on the topic for Kansas City Parent Magazine:

Entitled Children

Our 13-year old son’s cell phone was initially meant for calling home if baseball practice was cancelled, but has morphed into one cool gadget he carries with him everywhere, except, incidentally, to baseball practice where “it might get lost”.

Cell phones are just one of many entertainment options my generation did not have growing up, such as round-the-clock TV programming of every flavor, video games, personal music players, and social networking sites. According to most parents, their kids don’t view these things as privileges but as basic human rights they are entitled to.

Should this sense of entitlement be cause for alarm? Or does voicing concerns merely make us sound like our own parents thirty years ago?