Further complicating the homework is the increasing fashion for making it “creative” — which often renders it unnecessarily complicated, at least for the age and dexterity of many younger children. “I used to be very involved in my kids’ homework until my second grader came back with an assignment to recreate New York City’s waterways using a baking sheet, mounds of paper towels, tin foil and rivers of water poured from a pitcher,” says Marjorie Ingall, a Manhattan public school mother. “First of all, I don’t care about New York’s waterways as long as the water that comes out of the tap does not catch fire. But that aside — this is an assignment for me, not for an 8-year-old. There was just so much crying at my house.”

This propensity for Fun! has given rise to what the actress and author Annabelle Gurwitch calls the Parent Craft Project. As a woman who once hosted “Wa$ted!,” a reality show where families are shown how to have less of a carbon footprint, Ms. Gurwitch decided that her son’s California mission diorama had to be biodegradable, which meant no plastic lingering for eternity in a landfill.

“Have you ever tried to glue graham crackers with peanut butter? I don’t recommend it,” Ms. Gurwitch says. “But I wanted the mission to be edible. For two days straight we tried to get graham crackers to stack with our peanut butter mortar, crumbled oyster crackers for the walkways, columns made from breads sticks, rosemary from our garden for our foliage stuck to the base with egg whites. After my son would go to sleep I’d stay up for hours trying to fortify the cracker walls with sturdier Wasa crackers. A day later, when we delivered it for the whole school to see, it attracted ants and smelled like an old shoe — which when you actually think about it, is probably not unlike what those missions smelled like.” Ms. Gurwitch noted that her son’s project did receive the best left-handed compliment ever from the teacher: “It’s easy to see that you completed the project with no parental help.”

There is yet another factor that prompts a certain kind of parent to take on a kid’s homework: For those of us who were good students, it’s a chance to relive our glory days. It’s the nerd equivalent of the soccer dad barking orders to his kid on the fields.

John Munger is an associate professor of medicine and cell biology at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, so it would seem that helping with his teenage son’s science homework wouldn’t be much of a stretch. But his son doesn’t entirely share his enthusiasm, and he has discovered that starting sentences with “Check this out!” and “Here’s a cool thing!” does little to ease the tension. Then, Dr. Munger adds, “I tend to get all excited about the subject, feverishly researching on the Internet, and by the time I discover the answer, my son is thoroughly annoyed with me and has moved on to something else.”

Dr. Munger’s experience brought back my own memories of being helped by my mother, who also happened to be a doctor; she would become so engrossed in my math homework that while she completed it I was able to slowly back out of the room and continue reading “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” for the 400th time.