Rachel Bennett loves playing soccer, spending time with her grandparents and making jewelry with beads. But since the 12-year-old entered a magnet middle school in the fall — and began receiving two to four hours of homework a night — those activities have fallen by the wayside.

“She’s only a kid for so long,” said her father, Alex Bennett, of Silverado Canyon, Calif. “There’s been tears and frustration and family arguments. Everyone gets burned out and tired.”

He is part of a vocal movement of parents and educators who contend that homework overload is robbing U.S. children of needed sleep and playtime, chipping into family dinners and vacations and overly stressing young minds. The objections have been raised for years; increasingly, school districts are listening. They are banning busywork, setting time limits on homework and barring it on weekends and over vacations.

“Groups of parents are going to schools and saying, ‘Get real. We want our kids to have a life,'” said Cathy Vatterott, an associate education professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who has studied the issue.

Trustees in Danville, Calif., eliminated homework on weekends and vacations last year. Officials in Orange, Calif., where Rachel attends school, are reminding teachers about limits on homework and urging them not to assign it over weekends. A private school in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles has done away with book reports.

“As adults, if every book we ever read, we had to write a report on — would that encourage our reading or discourage it?” said Eileen Horowitz, head of school at Temple Israel of Hollywood Day School. “We realized we needed to rethink that.”

Homework was once hugely controversial in the United States. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, social commentators and physicians crusaded against it, convinced it was causing children to become wan, weak and nervous.

In a 1900 article titled “A National Crime at the Feet of American Parents,” in the Ladies’ Home Journal, editor Edward Bok wrote, “When are parents going to open their eyes to this fearful evil? Are they as blind as bats, that they do not see what is being wrought by this crowning folly of night study?”

California was at the vanguard of the anti-homework movement. In 1901, the California Legislature banned it for students younger than 15 and ordered high schools to limit it for older students to 20 recitations a week. The law was taken off the books in 1917.

Homework has fallen in and out of favor in the United States ever since, often viewed as a force for good when the nation feels threatened — after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, for example, and during competition with Japan in the 1980s.

The homework wars have reignited in recent years, with parents arguing that children are being given too much.

Much of the debate is driven by the belief that today’s students are doing more work at home than their predecessors. But student surveys do not bear that out, said Brian Gill, a senior social scientist with Mathematica Policy Research.

Instead, in today’s increasingly competitive race for college admission, student schedules are packed with clubs, sports and other activities in addition to homework, Gill said. Students — and parents — may just have less time, he said.