My In-Laws Undo Everything I Try to Teach My Kids About Studying

My mother-in-law believes that children should be comfortable. This is, on the face of it, an admirable belief. The problem is that her definition of comfort and mine have almost no overlap when it comes to homework time.

I believe in routines. Homework at the same time every day, at the desk, with the TV off. No snacks until the homework is done. No negotiation about whether the homework needs to be done. No hovering, no doing it for them, no sighing heavily over incorrect answers in a way that communicates to the child that the whole thing is beneath them.

My mother-in-law believes that her grandchildren have worked hard all day and deserve to relax when they get home. She also believes that if a child is having trouble with a worksheet, the efficient solution is to guide them, step by step, to the correct answers. She doesn't see this as doing the homework for them. She sees it as teaching. The fact that she is teaching them the exact answers to those specific questions, rather than the underlying concepts, is a distinction she finds pedantic.

My father-in-law, for his part, tends to emerge during revision periods to announce that he was "terrible at maths too, and look how I turned out," which is not the motivational speech it sounds like when your child is trying to get through long division.

We live separately — they're in Kowloon, we're in the New Territories — but they have the kids every Wednesday afternoon and every other weekend. I have sat at my kitchen table and mentally calculated the percentage of my carefully constructed homework routine that is being quietly dismantled across the harbour, and the number is not comfortable.

The issue isn't malice. That would actually be easier to deal with. The issue is love expressed through a completely different framework of what helping a child looks like.

In their generation — and my husband's parents both grew up working-class in the 1960s — educational support meant doing whatever it took to get the work done and ticked off. The goal was completion. Completion meant you weren't in trouble. In their family model, reducing a child's distress about schoolwork was an act of care, full stop. The idea that you might let a child sit with the frustration of not immediately knowing the answer — because that frustration is where the learning happens — sounds, to them, uncomfortably close to cruelty.

I tried, once, a formal conversation. I prepared notes. I explained, with great care, why consistency in homework expectations matters, why different rules in different environments confuses children, why their approach — however loving — was creating problems. My mother-in-law listened politely and then told me she understood perfectly, and the next Wednesday my son came home having been given all the answers to his comprehension worksheet, which she had then corrected in pencil so the marks would look like his.

I told my husband. His response was to gently mediate. This involved calling his mother, having a careful conversation that I was not part of, and then reporting back that she'd agreed to "try to let them work more independently." What this meant in practice was that she now waits five minutes before helping, instead of jumping in immediately. Progress, technically.

What I've landed on, after years of this, is a kind of diplomatic partition.

The grandparents' house has different rules. I've accepted this. It took longer than it should have, and I had to have a genuine conversation with myself about what I was actually controlling for. The research on this, as far as I understand it, is fairly clear: children can adapt to different expectations in different contexts. They're not confused by the fact that school has different rules than home, or that Grandma's house has different rules than both. What confuses them is when the adults in their life fight about it in front of them.

So we don't fight about it in front of them anymore. I've lowered my expectations for what Wednesday afternoons will produce academically, and I've raised my appreciation for what they produce relationally — my kids adore their grandparents in a way that has nothing to do with anything I've arranged, and that is genuinely valuable.

I still wince when my son comes home and tells me Grandma helped him with his English essay. I still occasionally lie awake wondering if we're raising children who don't know how to sit with difficulty. But I've stopped treating every deviation from the routine as a crisis.

The peace treaty was never formally signed. It exists in the same half-negotiated space as most family arrangements — held together by love, compromise, strategic blindness, and the shared understanding that we all want the same thing for these kids, even if we disagree violently about how to get there.

Most days, that's enough.