Well, it was a nice idea, anyway. By Sunday morning — one homework assignment into the year — she’d already cracked. At 11:30 a.m., the sight of her eighth grader’s backpack sitting in the front room, untouched since Friday, became too much. “I plopped it down right in front of him,” she said. That was followed by hours of reminders, initially gentle, but growing less so, as the Monday due-date loomed.

“I can’t stop myself,” Donovan said. “I want him to succeed.”

Never mind that Quin, 13, says the badgering doesn’t help — “It makes me less likely to do it,” were his exact words — or that the literature cautions against the technique. No matter how necessary it feels, family therapists and education experts say, nagging doesn’t address the underlying issue that’s preventing the student from doing the homework on her own, and instead can cause a variety of problems. Among them: It can breed resentment; make the student less interested in doing the work; turn assignments into the nagger’s responsibility, not the nagee’s; and actually diminish the value of the homework.

But with homework assignments coming in and a hyper-competitive world in which college-resume building starts in middle school, many parents say they fear if they don’t say something — or yell it — the work won’t get done.

Statistics on the incidence of nagging are hard to come by. But a number of factors have combined to ramp up the pressure families feel to get things done in a timely manner and that includes homework.

Let’s start with the amount of work kids get. The majority of students, regardless of grade level, spend less than one hour a day on assignments at home, according to research reported by The National Education Association . While this number has held steady for the past 50 years, in the past 20 years, homework has increased in the lower grades, according to the NEA.

Anyone who’s ever tried to cajole a reluctant fourth grader into doing a disliked math or writing assignment knows that homework that should take an hour can stretch into an entire unhappy afternoon or evening, a situation that working parents say they find particularly stressful. With about 71 percent of mothers with children under 18 in the workforce in 2011, compared with 47 percent of mothers in 1975, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, time is tighter than it used to be.

At the same time, the explosion of organized sports and activities, and the related car-pool responsibilities and practice time, means that many families’ schedules cannot tolerate even 10 minutes of procrastination.

But wait, there’s one more factor ratcheting up the pressure: Many parents feel responsible for making sure that their children’s homework is not just completed, but done to perfection.

The combination means that things can get emotional, quickly, even when the issue is something as seemingly benign as a few word problems for a third grader. “We all get stressed,” said Nikki McAuliffe, of Marblehead, describing what happens when she poses the seemingly straightforward question — “Have you done your homework?” — to her 9- and 12-year-old sons.

Many parents say they go straight to yelling, but McAullife uses the audible sigh technique. “They can read my tone,” she said, adding that she feels responsible for her children’s homework, yet unable to control whether it’s finished. “The teachers blame the parents if it’s not done,” she said.

In Hingham, Amy Nobile, co-author of “I was a Really Good Mom Before I had Kids,” and the mother of two, is also struggling with the issue.

“The kids are sick of us nagging, and we’re sick of us nagging, but we can’t get ourselves out of it,” she said. In what can be considered a self-intervention, she convened a family meeting before school started. “The number one item was homework and how we’re not going to have a blow-out every day in our home.”

Nobile explained to her children, ages 8 and 9, that a certain time would be designated for homework, and that she would leave the room while they worked, and return at the end of 45 minutes to answer questions.