Doing your child's homework is the same as cheating. For high school and college students, that can mean at the least a failing grade for the assignment, if not suspension. For elementary-school students, it may mean that your child has to redo the project.

The key is to draw a firm boundary when it comes to helping children with their homework, says family psychologist and author John Rosemond.

Rosemond says a generation has evolved of parents who frequently measure their parenting success on how involved they are with their child's homework.

And for parents who have clocked more hours than their children on that science project or term paper, he says, "stop."

"Tell your child that from now on, they're going to be expected to do their own homework," he says.

THINK LONG-TERM

Assign a special place that helps define for the child that this is his or her responsibility. Make sure it is away from family common areas, such as the living room or kitchen table.

Offer assistance, but limit the number of questions to three a night, with answers not exceeding 10 minutes. Give children a deadline to finish assignments.

Rosemond says parents often enable their children's dependence when it comes to homework. Initially, expect children to struggle when you refuse to do homework for them. Grades may drop, and they may not do as well on tests.

But he says the long-term results are worth it.

"Having to do independent work at home establishes a tolerance for frustration, and it develops the child's positive attitude toward his ability to solve problems and to learn to be responsible for himself," Rosemond says.

In the Cruz household, homework is a family affair. Glendale, Ariz., parents Marie and Miguel Cruz don't do homework for their children, ages 9, 13 and 15, but they make sure that the homework is checked, signed and redone if it's not correct.

If a child needs help, Marie or Miguel shows them where on the computer or in the book to go for the answer or for clarification.

"I say, 'Check your book and read everything from here to here and you will find the answer,' " Miguel says. "We never do the homework; that's their job. But it's our job to help them out."

THE SKILL OF SCAFFOLDING

Tempe, Ariz., Corona del Sol High School math teacher John Goux knows the homework issue as a teacher and as a parent.

He pleads guilty to having helped his fifth-grade daughter when she came home with three reports, all due within two weeks.

"I just did everything she couldn't," Goux says.

"When you have a little 11-year-old not able to schedule herself with that many deadlines, you do whatever you can do before she folds like a house of cards," he says.

He didn't stay up to finish a report while she went to bed, but Goux did help his daughter decide how to prioritize and showed her how to tackle each project piece by piece. It's what he does with students in his freshman and sophomore math classes.

Educators call it scaffolding: Learning how to build one skill on top of another.

Goux dedicates part of class time to homework so that students can ask him for help. He sees no benefit in having students and parents frustrated with homework that may be over all of their heads.

AVOID 'MCPARENTING'

Julianna Contreras, a fifth-grade teacher at Bicentennial North in the Glendale Elementary School District, is like most educators in her ability to spot a parent's over-involvement in a homework project.

The vocabulary is too sophisticated for the child's level; the adjectives are often perfect rather than the first ones listed in the thesaurus. (Kids use the first one because they figure that must mean it's the best, she says.) And when she quizzes them more closely, they don't know basic answers.

"I try to emphasize to parents that their child needs to be able to do this work," she says. "Helping them means the child is doing the work and maybe they (the parents) are taking them to the library and assisting them to find the information, but not finding it for them."

Educators continue to debate the value of homework, but they agree on this issue: It's the children's responsibility, not the parents'.

"The value of homework is watered down to the degree parents participate," says Rosemond, who wrote "Ending the Homework Hassle" (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1990, $9.95, paperback). Parents who cross the line between helping and doing are guilty of what Rosemond calls "McParenting."

"McParenting is parenting with short-term objectives in mind," Rosemond says.

"It's 'Let's get him through Friday's spelling,' or 'Let's get him into the gifted program.' It's all short-term objectives, and short-term objectives sacrifice long-term goals."

Rosemond adds: "People in the business and corporate world are pointing out more and more kids coming out of college lacking a work ethic. They lack the ability to hang in there with a task that is demanding and to get something through to completion.

"They have a low tolerance for frustration and expect on any given situation for someone else to solve the problem for them."

Here are five tips for parents when navigating homework:

• Remember, it's your children's homework, not yours.

• Help them with study skills such as organizing their environment, having folders for assignments, breaking a report into sections, taking breaks and proofreading their work.

• Make sure your child gets a break after school. He or she may need a little bit of downtime.

• Remember water and food. It's impossible to think well when you are not properly hydrated and fed, a particular issue for children who go back to school in triple-digit temperatures.

• Make frequent, short check-ins with your child when he or she is doing homework. These help keep him or her on track and focused.

Source: Phoenix area psychologist Marlo Archer