The Emotional Labor of Teaching a Child

Teaching children requires a kind of patience no one ever really prepares you for.

Yesterday, for the first time, I decided to help my five-year-old niece with her homework because her lesson teacher was unavailable. I was all confident, thinking it would be a short and simple task only for me to come out with a pounding headache and a new respect for anyone who teaches young children for a living.

Homework, in theory, is meant to reinforce what a child has already been taught in school. It is supposed to refresh their memory, strengthen understanding, and encourage independent thinking. Simply calling out answers for a child to copy, or worse, writing it for them, defeats the entire purpose. It teaches dependence. And in a world where AI is now readily available, that kind of early dependency becomes even more dangerous as it trains children to outsource thinking instead of engaging with it.

What I didn’t anticipate was my niece’s complete withdrawal from the process. This little human barely spoke. She just sat there, staring into space each time I read out a question and demanded an answer, at least an attempt. She seemed completely uninterested, very unbothered and unmoved by my questions. Her silence frustrated me more than wrong answers ever could.

One of the questions asked her to write words that begin with the letter M. I assumed, wrongly, that three-letter words wouldn’t be a struggle. But instead of man, mat, or mom, she hit me with words like raccoon and ball. Everything except an actual word that begins with M. When I patiently supplied the words and even spelled them out slowly, she wrote them backwards. At that point, my patience was hanging by a very thin thread and I genuinely wondered if she was doing it deliberately.

For a brief moment, I thought of sending her to a naughty corner. And then another thought followed, how do teachers manage classrooms full of children my niece’s age, knowing that some days they will be stubborn, unresponsive, or emotionally unavailable?

So I swallowed my irritation over and over again. I waited. I softened my voice and I gave her time. Eventually, or rather miraculously to the glory of God, lmao, she began to respond.

But the question lingered in my mind, does it really have to take hours of patience before a child meets you halfway?

What pained me so much was that I didn’t begin harshly or raise my voice. I have noticed a pattern in her and it’s okay to infer that my niece simply hates homework. She hates structured learning. But avoidance doesn’t change necessity. Learning is non-negotiable, not because children must be perfect, but because they deserve the chance to grow, think, and understand the world for themselves.

That afternoon stretched my patience but it kinda also taught me that patience with children isn’t just about instant results but about choosing to remain calm repeatedly, even when you feel stretched thin. It’s about remembering that learning is not linear and children are not machines. They are tiny humans navigating attention, emotion, curiosity and resistance all at once. But, I rather know this and keep my distance, aint helping her with no homework anymore.