You can limit your children to one or two outside activities each; if the homework burden is too high you should talk to the teachers; but by all means you should make it clear to the children that homework is their responsibility , not youre, that you will only answer questions about what the teacher is asking them to do if the instructions are unclear. You already did first grade. Now it's time for your daughter to.
Why do you think your laissez faire attitude towards helping the child do work is appropriate?
Secondly, there IS such a thing as too much homework.
The problem is that in the early grades the parent has to listen to the children read about 30 minutes a night. I have twins, so that makes me listening to them for an hour.
Then I have to give them practice spelling tests on a few nights before the weekly tests. That takes about 1/2 an hour on two nights.
Then my kids do ask questions. They need ideas for writing sentences out of their spelling words. That's more time.
Then my 5th grader has projects that need all sorts of supplies and definitely need parental supervision (filming a California mission).
It's tooo much!
I absolutely agree. This is very important. I can't understand why it is so hard for some parents to understand that kids cannot learn everything in school. Kids need some time to absorb what they learned in school, and it is best done through homework. I actually moved my kids to private school because they didn't have enough homework in public school.