>Reading one age appropriate book per week has a huge compounding effect. This is known and studied. Source? I don't know your study, but most these reading st

>Reading one age appropriate book per week has a huge compounding effect. This is known and studied. Source? I don't know your study, but most these reading studies just end up measuring socioeconomic status. Rich people make their kids read more, and rich people's kids are more successful, therefore reading as a kid correlates with success. But I don't see any reason to believe those kids would be any better off if they didn't read. It's not like reading increases your IQ or gives you knowledge you couldn't learn much more efficiently elsewhere. At best reading increases your skill at... reading. Which is valuable, and I will mention that next. But it isn't magic like many people believe it is. >As in many things, there is a balance somewhere. You need some level of rote homework to drive home basic concepts. Sorry--vocabulary, spelling, and times tables, for example, need spaced repetition and learning them sucks. But they suck whether you are 5 or 50. And yet people who grew up without homework in elementary school seem to be able to do these things fine. Why can't they be learned in the 6 hours of school they are already attending? Why do they need even more hours of studying to learn these basic things? I also object to the idea that learning needs to be tedious and boring, but that is just my opinion. Still, you learn vocab best through just absorbing language naturally as all children do. Not being forced to memorize vocab words. Spelling likewise comes naturally after you learn to read. Times tables are basically unnecessary in the age of calculators, and just teach children to grow up hating math. >However, I find this statement laughable: "Can it be true that the hours of lost playtime, power struggles and tears are all for naught?" If doing homework is a power struggle in elementary school, you're a poor parent and are raising an entitled brat. You have no idea. I was that kid. I fought so hard in the fourth grade against excessive homework. I had very bad ADHD. I just couldn't focus. Forcing myself to do hours of homework, at that age, was torture. I had to be prescribed large doses of stimulants, as a child, to keep up.