The single most common message we get from parents goes something like: "Homework time is destroying our family. He cries. I shout. We both feel awful. Help." If that's you, first, you're not alone, and second, it's almost never a discipline problem. It's a mismatch problem. The task is wrong-sized for the child's current decoding load.
diagnose before you fix
Spend one evening just observing. Don't try to fix anything. Notice:
- How long until the first sign of stress? (Yawning, fidgeting, asking for water, these come before tears.)
- Which bit triggers it? Decoding new words? Writing? The volume of pages? The fact that it's silent reading?
- What does success-mode look like? Is there a time of day, a chair, a snack, a parent that works better?
You're looking for the smallest change with the biggest effect. For most families it's one of three things: time of day, modality, or quantity.
the moves that work
- Move the slot. Right after school is the worst time for most dyslexic children, their cognitive tank is empty. After a snack, after twenty minutes outside, or even before school often works dramatically better.
- Split the modality. The teacher set twenty minutes of reading? Do ten minutes of the child reading aloud and ten minutes of you reading aloud (or Wobble reading aloud while the child follows the words). The brain still does the matching work; the decoding strain is halved.
- Negotiate quantity with the school. Most teachers, asked directly, are happy to swap a long passage for a shorter one read more carefully. The SENCO is your ally here, copy them in.
- Use a visible timer. Ten minutes feels infinite to a struggling reader. A timer they can see turns it from "forever" into "a thing that ends."
- End on success, always. Stop one sentence before the hard bit. Tomorrow you start with "remember where we got to? Nice bit, that."
what to stop doing
- Stop correcting every mis-read word. Pick the ones that change the meaning; let the rest go.
- Stop using reading as a punishment or a condition ("no screen time until you finish your book"). It poisons the well.
- Stop comparing to siblings or classmates, even casually. Children hear it and remember it for years.
- Stop apologising to the teacher for unfinished homework. Email a one-line factual note: "Twenty minutes attempted, nine completed, child tired." That's data the school needs.
The aim isn't a perfectly completed reading log. It's a child who, at sixteen, still believes they can read.