Homework, sleep deprivation and anxiety

There's an article on sleep deprivation and anxiety today in the Huffington Post.

I offered the following responses:

Although this study was conducted on adults, it has obvious bearing on the well-being of young people. One of the things I have found in my studies of homework-trapped children is that they appear angry and rebellious, but they are actually quite anxious and afraid. Defiance is a strategy they use to cope with unrelenting pressures from parents and teachers alike. They loss respite at home. They are pushed to do work up until bedtime. They have trouble sleeping, and, in total, this makes it more difficult for them to work. This article adds one more piece, that the sleep deprivation that follows then increases the anxiety, which, in your people who feel under the gun, gets expressed as "bad behavior."



Dr. Kenneth Goldberg is a clinical psychologist with 35 years of professional experience in dealing with many different psychological issues. He is the author of The Homework Trap: How to Save the Sanity of Parents, Students and Teachers and currently works in his own private practice.

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Homework, anxiety, and school performance

I read an interesting blog post today on anxiety and school performance. The author claims that one in eight students suffers from anxiety, that anxiety affects working memory, and that this affects school performance. I believe the author is right and that her ideas coincide well with mine. 

In my work, I talk about under-the-radar learning disabilities and how they affect homework performance. In fact, many homework-trapped children, who appear defiant, are actually anxious. They manage their anxiety through avoidant and rebellious behaviors.

Among the scales on a standard IQ test, working memory (one of the two major under-the-radar learning disorders I refer to) is the one that is most directly affected by anxiety. If a child is anxious, the child cannot focus.  He appears to have ADD. He comes home from school clueless, where he is pressured to do things he cannot do, increasing his anxiety.

The major difference between the writer of this article and me is that this writer appears to focus on treating the anxiety whereas I consider it important to reduce the pressure.  If the child remains under unrelenting pressure, anxiety reduction techniques will not help. First and foremost, we need to know that the child can do what the child is asked to do, and we’ll never get the answer until we limit the time of the homework session and step back to observe what the child does.

Dr. Kenneth Goldberg is a clinical psychologist with 35 years of professional experience in dealing with many different psychological issues. He is the author of The Homework Trap: How to Save the Sanity of Parents, Students and Teachers and currently works in his own private practice.

Visit the The Homework Trap website