The Boston Globe

Quin Donovan says his mom, Elaine, nagging him about his homework “makes me less likely to do it.”

By Beth Teitell Globe Staff

This was going to be the year that Elaine Donovan stopped nagging Quin to do his homework. “If he fails, he fails,” the Charlestown mother told herself before school started. “Let him face the music.”

Well, it was a nice idea, anyway. By Sunday morning — one homework assignment into the year — she’d already cracked. At 11:30 a.m., the sight of her eighth grader’s backpack sitting in the front room, untouched since Friday, became too much. “I plopped it down right in front of him,” she said. That was followed by hours of reminders, initially gentle, but growing less so, as the Monday due-date loomed.

“I can’t stop myself,” Donovan said. “I want him to succeed.”

Never mind that Quin, 13, says the badgering doesn’t help — “It makes me less likely to do it,” were his exact words — or that the literature cautions against the technique. No matter how necessary it feels, family therapists and education experts say, nagging doesn’t address the underlying issue that’s preventing the student from doing the homework on her own, and instead can cause a variety of problems. Among them: It can breed resentment; make the student less interested in doing the work; turn assignments into the nagger’s responsibility, not the nagee’s; and actually diminish the value of the homework.

But with homework assignments coming in and a hyper-competitive world in which college-resume building starts in middle school, many parents say they fear if they don’t say something — or yell it — the work won’t get done.