“Have you checked it?”

“Yes...”

Every parent has had this conversation.

Your child finishes their homework, you ask whether they’ve checked it, they say they have, and then you glance at it and immediately spot three missing full stops, ten spelling mistakes and a sentence that appears to have wandered off halfway through and never come back.

So what’s going on? Are they being lazy?

No, not necessarily.

The truth is that most children are not naturally good at checking their own work. And there are a couple of very understandable reasons why.