“The first thing you should do is talk to the teacher and let the teacher know how long it’s taking the child to do homework,” Burris says.

So, if you’re a parent of a first-grader who’s getting 30 minutes of homework a night, what should you do? In a nutshell, then, we don’t have evidence that homework is beneficial for young kids, yet studies suggest that they are doing more homework than even the pro-homework organizations recommend, and the amounts they’re getting also seem to be increasing. (By this rule, kindergarteners shouldn’t be getting any homework.) Considering these numbers in combination with their findings on how homework can increase family stress, the researchers concluded, “the disproportionate homework load for K–3 found in our study calls into question whether primary school children are being exposed to a positive learning experience or to a scenario that may promote negative attitudes toward learning.”

They had 1,173 parents fill out a homework-related survey at pediatricians’ offices and found that the homework burden in early grades is quite high: Kindergarten and first-grade students do about three times as much homework as is recommended by the “10-minute rule.” What’s the 10-minute rule, you ask? It’s a standard, adopted by most public schools around the country (more on this later), recommending that students spend roughly 10 times their grade level in minutes on homework each night-so first-graders should be spending 10 minutes on homework and fifth-graders 50. But in the 2015 study in Providence I mentioned earlier, researchers did attempt to answer this question.

I have a ton of homework