Thank you so much for all your encouragement, Melissa! I plan to keep sharing. I appreciate you taking the time to comment and support me.

You might speak to the teacher about your family’s values around holidays and that filling time with homework doesn’t fit for your family. It would be interesting to see if your wishes are respected.

Yes – totally agree – ex primary school teacher here and I always worked in the holidays (and weekends).

Wow, I feel like so could have written this comment. Did you find any answers/way forward?

I’ma teacher and agree that mandatory summer homework isn’t a good idea (for a LOT of reasons that go well beyond what’s in this article), but I just wanted to point out that teachers actually do a lot of work overall the summer, and ALL of it is unpaid. I kind of hate that no teacher ever took you up on that and they all just allowed you to believe that we don’t do any work. It’s sure nowhere near close to 40 hour weeks, but it’s probably at least as much time as they’re asking of their students. We can discuss the issues with summer homework without having to bring teachers’ lives into this at all.

I came to the comments to share this very thought. While I do love this advice overall, there are many, many families that don’t have the option of offering so much choice to their children; and many teachers who find themselves facing down immense learning loss in the fall for kids who haven’t picked up a book or been read to all summer (as one example.) It’s a slippery slope. I appreciate this guidance, but it’s skewed heavily for privilege that is elusive to many.

I’ve given my child the freedom to do nothing. To choose his activities. As a single child, he WILL pick screens on waking and go all day. He will forego eating until his stomach cramps in pain. He will not even get up to use the washroom. He will not go to sleep and at 2:00a.m I have to step in and insist.

The next day he will do it all again. Except now he is miserable and disregulated. He will scream and shout at the slightest thing. And this will go on.

The funny thing is he LOVES reading, sports, etc. But, he doesn’t want to and I understand can’t do most alone. Tennis, volleyball, badminton, baseball are not things you can really do by yourself. So, yes, I can let him continue to choose, but our lives after as a result and so do the neighbours.

Any direction on this would be appreciated. He does have a brain based spectrum disorder.