It is early October, and in every home with a child in high school the same scene plays out. One afternoon you look at the exercise book, you notice that the maths exercise is wrong from the second line, and you realise that your child has not understood the topic. Your hand goes to the pen on its own. You sit down, you solve the exercise, “look, you do it like this”. They nod, the homework is finished and everyone is relieved.
The problem comes two weeks later, at the test, when nobody can sit next to them in front of the blank sheet. October is the month when the habits of the first term are formed (Italian schools split the year into two or three terms): what you do now stays, for better or worse, until Christmas and beyond. That is why it is worth understanding how to really help.
I am assuming your child is in high school and that the subject is one where an adult can technically step in: maths, physics, even Italian or languages. The temptation to take over is the same everywhere.
Why doing it for them does not help
Doing the exercise for them has three results, all of them bad.
The first is that your child does not learn to do that type of exercise. Watching someone solve a problem produces the feeling of having understood, not the ability to solve it. It is the difference between watching a recipe video and cooking.
The second is that this feeling of having understood is deceptive and delays the moment when the problem comes out. At home everything seems fine, in class it does not.
The third, more subtle, concerns the relationship. If every difficulty is solved because a parent arrives, your child learns that difficulties are not to be faced but handed over. And you are left with a task that never ends, because the topics get harder and at some point you can no longer keep up.
The rule: I explain the first one, you do the second in front of me, you do the third alone
This is the rule I recommend to parents and that I also use with my students. It has three steps and works on any subject with repeatable exercises.
- I do. You do the first one, out loud, explaining every step and why. Not a silent solution: say what you are looking at, what you choose and why you discard the alternatives.
- We do. Your child does the second exercise, with you beside them. You watch and stay quiet. If they get stuck, don’t give the answer: ask a question (we talk about that below). If they make a mistake, let them get to the end and then go back together to find where.
- You do. Your child does the third alone, while you go and do something else. Then you look at the result.
If the third one works, the topic is learned, at least for today. If it doesn’t, that is not a failure: go back to step two with a similar exercise. If even after two or three rounds step two doesn’t hold, the problem is not the exercise but something earlier, and we will see that further on.
One detail that matters: the rule should be applied to exercises of the same type, not to different exercises. If the second is very different from the first, your child cannot imitate the method and step two becomes a shot in the dark.
The questions to ask instead of giving answers
When they get stuck, the answer comes out of your mouth before you notice. Keep a few questions ready, even written on a slip of paper.
- “What exactly is the problem asking?” Many mistakes come from reading the text, not from the calculation.
- “What data do you have?” Get them to list it.
- “Where have you seen something similar?” This points back to the exercise book or to the example worked in class.
- “What is the last step you are sure about?” Finding the point where the reasoning breaks is half the work.
- “How can you check whether the result makes sense?” It teaches them to check instead of waiting for someone else to correct.
You may not know the answer either: that is perfectly fine. “I don’t know, let’s see in the book where it explains it” is an excellent sentence, because it shows that adults look things up too. What doesn’t work is pretending to know and confidently saying something wrong.
When to close the book
Studying for three hours straight is not better studying: after a certain time your child looks at the page and nothing goes in any more. For many young people of that age, blocks of 20-25 minutes of focused work work well, followed by a short five-minute break without a phone in hand. I wrote about how to build the blocks across the week in study plan: the block method and calendar.
To know when to stop, use these signals:
- they repeat the same mistake three times in a row;
- they read the same line without taking in what it says;
- they get irritated, huff, start saying “I’ll never understand it anyway”;
- they answer at random just to finish.
In all of these cases, pushing on is counterproductive. Close the book, note where you stopped (“tomorrow we start again from problem 4”), and let the mind work on it in the background. Coming back the next day to a stuck exercise is often more effective than squeezing it for an hour.
If the block seems to be more about nerves than about understanding, and the test is looming, the topic is a different one: in managing test anxiety in physics and maths there are specific suggestions.
What to check every evening in five minutes
You don’t need to sit next to them every day. You need five minutes, at the end of the afternoon, with three simple questions.
- What was due for tomorrow and what for the week? If they don’t know, the school diary or the online register is the starting point, not you.
- What did they do today of what was planned? A one-line answer is enough.
- Is there something they didn’t understand? If so, which topic. There is no need to solve it now: it needs to be named, so that tomorrow they can ask the teacher or bring it to a working session with you.
I will add a fourth thing that is not a question: glance, without correcting, at how the exercise book is kept. A tidy book with the exercises marked is a good sign; one with skipped pages or hurried writing says more than a thousand words.
No interrogations. If the evening turns into an exam, your child will learn to answer “all done” and nothing more.
Typical mistakes of parents (and of children)
After years of tutoring, the mistakes I see are always the same.
Correcting with a pen in their exercise book. That book is theirs. If you see a mistake, point it out out loud or with a light pencil mark that they then rub out. A correction written by an adult in the book ends up being copied without being understood, and the teacher will see correct exercises that don’t match what your child can actually do.
Comparing with classmates. “Marco got an eight” is no use to anyone. It raises the pressure and shifts attention from understanding to feeling judged. If you need a point of comparison, compare your child with themselves: what they could do in September and what they can do now.
Taking over. This is the mother of all mistakes. It often comes from a lovely need, the need not to see a child suffer, but it achieves the opposite effect.
Changing method every week. One method for two weeks and then another doesn’t give you time to see whether it works. Give the “I do, we do, you do” rule at least a month before judging it.
Giving help only close to the test. The night before a test you can recover very little. The useful help is the help of ordinary days, when there is room to manoeuvre.
Using everything you find online. Instant solutions are found in a moment and the student learns to copy them without understanding. On using artificial intelligence tools, with a method that lets your child do the work, I wrote in using AI to study maths and physics.
And one of the children’s mistakes: hiding what they haven’t understood. If a young person is afraid of disappointing, they will say “I understood” even when it isn’t true. That is why the question “is there something you didn’t understand?” should be asked in a neutral tone, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
How to tell whether you need outside help
Not everything is solved with the three-step rule. There are situations where the help of an adult who is not the parent makes the difference. Here are the signals I consider clearest.
- Step two never holds. Even with similar exercises, they can’t do it alone, and the questions don’t unblock them. Usually underneath there is a gap in the basics, often from middle school, that this year’s programme takes for granted.
- The same subject, the same block, for more than three weeks. A single hard topic is normal; a whole subject that doesn’t move is not.
- You can no longer keep up. It happens sooner than you think: already halfway through the first two years of high school in maths and physics, many parents get lost, and that is entirely normal.
- The atmosphere at home has been spoiled. If the study afternoon has become a daily row, having a third person as a go-between protects the relationship.
- The student says “I’m not cut out for it”. Almost always it is not a question of aptitude, but of a hole to fill. Hearing that at fourteen is already a signal to take seriously.
Outside help doesn’t mean lessons every day and doesn’t mean “offloading” the problem. The most useful work, in general, is to find the exact point where your child lost the thread and rebuild from there. If you need to understand where the problem lies, find out how I work on the basics on the maths page. If you’d rather talk about it first, write to me: the first introductory call is free and serves to say frankly whether a few weeks of targeted work are enough, or whether the method at home is already working and just needs supporting.
In short, for this week
You don’t need to change everything from tomorrow. Choose one exercise from this week’s homework, apply the sequence I do, we do, you do, and keep the five questions ready. Watch what happens at step two: it is the most valuable piece of information you will have all month.
