Experts in child development offer practical guidelines in Going to School: How to Help Your Child Succeed but homework for preschoolers is not included as an attribute of success . The emphasis on homework has changed over the years. Once relegated to lower elementary years, it has become more prevalent in kindergarten, and more recently, even in preschool. In spite of researchers’ findings that homework has little value – and may even be detrimental – for preschoolers, there still exists a push for homework at this early age. “An Early Start on Homework” ponders the efficacy of homework for pre-kindergarten students.

Linda Davey, head of the early childhood and elementary program at Hofstra University, sees no benefit in preschool homework, stating that “Preschool is a time for some critical developmental readiness that should take precedence over homework: how to get in line, how to share, pretend play, kindness and fairness. All the things that are being shortchanged in this rush for precocity."

But, while few of today’s parents had homework before third grade, federal reports like “The Nation at Risk,” published in the 1980s and 1990s, emphasized the downturn in educational standards, and the push for earlier homework and an earlier start on preparing children for the future was born.

Often, it is parents who request take-home assignments for their preschoolers. Darragh O'Donnell, a fourth-grade teacher and mother of a 5 year-old, says that her child never complains about the homework. "She feels so special. My older kids had it too at that age, and I felt like they had such a background academically. It fostered a love of learning."

Karen Morelli, building administrator for the Apple schools in Edgewater and Cliffside Park, New Jersey, where some 4-year-olds can read and do multiplication, believes that “Homework is fun for children, and if you teach them at a young age, they'll enjoy it.” Jeannine Meli, director of First Discoveries Preschool in Middletown, has found that, for the children who do homework, “it's amazing, the difference. Their letters are formed better, and those are the ones that are apt to start reading earlier."

The typical preschool workload is one homework sheet a week, often described as "optional,” and is usually tracing and writing a letter of the alphabet. The goal of the homework is to get help children write and identify letter sounds.

Researchers, however, say that just because these children can do the work doesn’t mean they should. Loryane Carbon, who directs Sarah Lawrence College’s early childhood research and teaching center, believes that “"When kindergarten teachers say a child is ready to learn they mean, 'Can she play with other children? Can she work with a group?' They don't ask if she has a sense of letters or numbers, because they know those things will come."

If preschoolers don’t have the attention span or fine motor skills to do the work, temper tantrums can result, as well as an erosion of family time. Some preschool directors agree, and won’t give homework in spite of parental pressure to the contrary.