I honestly couldn’t tell you what my answer to that question was when I was little. I lived in the country — mountain country at that. Yes, there’s a difference. If you don’t know it, you aren’t very familiar with country. Anyway, since Doodle started school this past week, she was asked what she wanted to be — a video game designer.

The other night we had our first homework fight.

“Go do your homework.”

“Not without you in there with me.”

“If you have a question, you can come ask me for help.”

“I’m not doing it unless you are in there with me.”

Ok, so I did give into this one. I know we have kind of spoiled her when it comes to homework in that we sit down with her and walk her through it. We’re trying to break that habit. I was trying to break it. Really. I was trying.

She pulls out a math sheet and a piece of paper that she had starting writing on in class. They were to write out the numbers in words and then give the place value of the number circled. Her writing was really bad. She writes from the left to the edge of the paper on the right. She writes rather large and she misspelled a couple of the words. I informed her that her handwriting was bad and she’d need to rewrite it.

Trouble began.

Through her tears and fussing, this is roughly the conversation we had:

“Rewrite your homework.”

“I can’t. I’m stupid.”

“No, you are not stupid. I don’t ever want you to say that again.”

“Well, it’s true.”

“No, it’s not. You have the work done correctly. You just need to do your best writing.”

“I don’t have best writing. I can’t write any better than that.”

“Yes, you can. Calm down and I’ll help you with the spelling. You just need to take your time.”

Now, I had decided that since this was math homework, that I could in fact, help her with spelling hundred and thousand correctly without impeding her learning too much. She went back to the table and proceeded to crumple the sheet she’d started in class.

“Why did you do that? I said your work was right. If you throw it away, you’ll have to do all that work again instead of just copying it neater.”

“Well, if my mother doesn’t appreciate the hard work I put into this in class, then it’s no good!”

Yikes.

We sit and have some more meaningful conversation about how she’s not stupid — she just needs to take her time and not write so fast. Then she starts on the “I hate homework” train.

“You have to do homework. You have no choice.”

“Why? I don’t want to go to school any more. I hate homework. I want to throw all homework in the trash.”

“You have to do homework to learn in school so when you graduate you can get a good job.”

“I don’t want a job.”

“You have to have a job to get money to pay for things like a house, food, and games you like to play.”

“I’ll just get married.” So now she’s implying that I don’t work.

“Um, nobody’s going to want just marry you and take care of you — even I work.” Here’s where I kind of want to say that I don’t have the best reasoning in the world. I never thought I’d be trying to reason with a 9-year-old about this stuff. I am blessed in that I don’t have to work, but I was failing at justifying school at this moment.

“You work?” She looked totally amazed.

“Yes, I work. I work from home on websites.”

“Well, I just want to be able to play whenever I want and take naps — like Grandma.” Mind you the girl does NOT take naps!

“Ok. Grandma is 65. She graduated high school and worked at a job for well over 40 years before she retired. When you get to be 65, maybe then you can quit work and do whatever you want. But you still have to go to school and do homework.”

Like I said, I know I didn’t handle that very well at all. I think she even told me that she would live here for the rest of her life — that she didn’t need to work when she was older. Should I start to threaten to kick her out now? Nope. Then she’d tell me she’ll go live with Grandma and Grandpa.

This was much longer than I thought it would be, but it’ll be great reading for her when she graduates high school. Any tips for motivating a child? Beat her more? Bribe her with money? Games?