When DD was young there was active requests from schools that encouraged parents to be involved with homework. I think what most posters have written has reflected the type of help we were asked to give.....listening to reading initially and helping with sight words. It was a bit pointless for us as DD was a fluent reader so she had comprehension homework and I was expected to help her work through it.
As kids get older help usually means checking what homework they have, talking about how they plan to tackle the tasks, how they are going to make an appropriate space to work, advising on taking breaks or staying on task. Modelling how to do a math question or physics question by finding a similar one and working through it is fine. I am no longer any help with that but there are plenty of places to go on the Internet.
I don't have a problem at all with editing, all authored work needs editing and if you are too close to a piece it is usually hard to see even some obvious mistakes. Advising that a sentence seems repetitive or a paragraph should be moved or brainstorming a better word to mean X is all pretty normal but the bulk of the work should be the student's. Our DD wouldn't let it be any other way because they do courses on plagiarism at school.
At the end of the day it is all about facilitating learning and growing children with the meta analytical skills to manage on their own. But if they need he,p to get there, be it from a teacher or a parent, then they deserve help. Doing it for them isn't help. Sometimes it can be hard to know whether you are helping or doing but the key is, is my child learning or am I taking the learning from them.
This article is a review of the research of parental involvement in homework.
http://www.hfrp.org/publications-re...-school-program-staff-and-parent-leaders
