Kennedy: Do your homework, parents

Coaching your own child is hard -- especially if you have expertise in the task at hand.

Ask any ex-jock who has tried to coach Little League. Sparks also fly when schoolteachers help their offspring with schoolwork.

I have become my 7-year-old son's writing coach. This, I have learned, is a path fraught with peril.

At first, he was eager. We'd clear away the supper dishes and sit at the kitchen table to build sturdy, subject-verb-object sentences.

Me: "Your homework sheet says to write five sentences about your seminar today. So, what did you talk about?"

Son: "A Tennessee person, a singer. (Long pause.) Oh, I can't remember who it was," he said, clamping his hands against the sides of his skull as if his head were about to explode.

Me: "Relax, Son. We'll figure this out. Was this person perhaps named Elvis?"

Son: "No. Not Elvis. It was a girl. Oh, I can't remember, Daddy. She was poor, I think."

Me: "Good, that's a start. Was it Loretta Lynn?"

Son: "No, that doesn't sound right. She had a coat made out of rags. The other kids made fun of her."

Me: "Dolly Parton?"

Son: "That's it," he exclaimed, and we exchanged high fives.

I made a mental note to teach him in a few years how to give the universal charades clue for Dolly Parton.

The next night, he was pouty because he hadn't been assigned to study the smart-kid spelling list.

Me: "Why don't I teach you to spell a hard word. It might make your feel better," I said.

Son: "OK. What word?"

I told him that some people can take pictures of spelling words with their brains. Other people, like me, have to make up stories to help us remember.

I quickly taught him to spell Tennessee. "Look, it has two mountains and two rivers," I said, tracing the humps in the n's and the serpentine shape of the s's. Within minutes he was spelling Tennessee flawlessly and giggling at the delicious thought of showing off for his friends the next day.

Then, last week, something changed suddenly with our homework ritual.

"Ready for homework," I said one night.

"Nope," he said.

After a brief negotiation failed to break our impasse, he ran out of the room and hid behind a hall door.

When I finally cornered him, he said: "I want Mommy to help me with homework."

"Mommy's busy," I said. "I'll help you."

"No," he said. Then, he ran to his room and shut the door.

We patched it up later, but he ended up, by choice, doing his homework alone.

I still don't know what went awry. Maybe he was tired? Maybe he'd had a bad day? Or maybe when you're 7 you just change your mind about things.

Later that night, I saw him in the master bedroom making up our bed. (He and his little brother had scattered the pillows earlier.) It was his way of mending fences.

Sons secretly want the approval of their fathers, except when they don't. Boyhood is not a straight shot to wisdom.

Fatherhood 101 is a hard class, too, and I obviously have some homework to do.