Parenting & Family Quote by Dave Eggers

Eggers isn’t praising homework; he’s diagnosing the conditions under which kids stop treating learning like background noise. The line is built on a small, almost suspiciously practical miracle: a child completes schoolwork during the school day, with an adult beside them, and then gets to go home free. That freedom is the point. Eggers frames attention as a form of infrastructure, something you can provide (or fail to) the same way you provide books or a safe classroom. When it’s there, the behavior we like to moralize about - discipline, focus, follow-through - suddenly looks less like virtue and more like logistics.

The subtext is a critique of how easily we offload education onto the home while pretending it’s equal for everyone. “They don’t do their homework in front of the TV” isn’t a scold aimed at parents or kids; it’s a quiet acknowledgement of crowded apartments, exhausted guardians, multiple jobs, and the way screens become babysitters in an attention economy. Eggers’s repeated “they don’t” works like a drumbeat against the usual narrative that kids procrastinate because they’re lazy or distracted by choice.

Context matters here: Eggers’s career has long braided storytelling with civic work, especially around literacy and tutoring. This quote reads like field notes from that world - the voice of someone who’s watched what happens when you replace punishment and pep talks with time, proximity, and sustained human focus. It’s reform-minded, but it’s also literary: he makes “finished” sound like dignity.