I Was Never Any Good at Maths Either
It is the kindest sentence you own, and most of us have said it over a half-finished worksheet. A run of studies on what happens next at the kitchen table suggests the thing that travels from parent to child isn't the ability. It's the feeling.
Somewhere around the second long division question, your child puts the pencil down and says they can't do it. And out it comes, the kindest sentence you own. "Don't worry. I was never any good at maths either."
It lands as sympathy. You are taking the blame off them, making it hereditary, letting them off the hook. Most of us have said some version of it.
About 35 per cent of British adults say that having to do maths in everyday situations makes them feel anxious, and roughly a third say they would not feel confident helping a child with maths homework. Nobody says "I was never any good at reading." Maths is the one subject where announcing your own failure counts as being supportive.
A run of studies over the past ten years has looked at what happens next. Some of it has been argued over and partly knocked down. What is left is still worth knowing.
The children of maths-anxious parents learnt less maths across the year and ended it more anxious. The detail that got the headlines was this: it showed up mainly when those anxious parents were helping with homework often. Help less, and the link faded.
What made no difference at all was how good the parents actually were at maths. Their own knowledge didn't predict anything. The feeling travelled. The ability didn't.
That finding turned into advice: if numbers make you nervous, hand the homework over to someone else. Then a much larger study tested it, with 3,018 children across 242 classes, measured at the start and end of the year. The homework part did not hold up. The researchers could not reproduce it.
What they found instead was the plainer and more awkward version. Children of maths-anxious parents did a little worse and felt a little more anxious, whether or not those parents sat down with the worksheet. So stepping away isn't the fix.
Researchers at Cambridge asked 1,757 children in Years 4 to 7 about this, in schools across the south east of England. Of the children with high maths anxiety, 77 per cent were normal or high achievers on their ordinary school maths tests. The anxiety was not a readout of ability. It mostly wasn't even tracking it.
Asked when it started, children in that study pointed at a bad test result, or at the moment they noticed a friend or a sibling was ahead of them. Maths, they said, was the subject that felt harder than the others.
And it is becoming more common. Across the OECD, the share of 15-year-olds saying they get very nervous doing maths problems rose from 31 per cent in 2012 to 39 per cent in 2022. Two-thirds now worry about getting poor marks in it.
By the summer there was. The more anxious the teacher, the more likely the girls in her class were to agree that boys are good at maths and girls are good at reading, and the lower those girls' maths scores were. The boys were unaffected.
It is a small study, it was done in American classrooms, and it has been picked apart since. But it points the same way as everything else here. Children work out who is allowed to be good at maths by watching the adults nearest them, and not from what those adults say about maths in general. From how they behave when a number turns up.
That is worth sitting with if you have ever said the sentence in front of a daughter.
The maths group gained roughly the equivalent of three extra months of maths over the year. The biggest gains went to the children whose parents were the most anxious about maths. Using it about once a week was enough to register.
There were no drills and no times tables in it. It was a short story with numbers in it, read together, the way you would read anything else at bedtime. Which suggests that the thing being repaired wasn't the maths. It was the atmosphere around the maths.
You don't have to get better at maths to stop passing yours on. Mostly you have to stop narrating. "I was never any good at this" can become "I find this bit hard too, let's work it out", which is truer anyway and costs the child nothing.
We have learnt to be careful about what we say in front of children about our own bodies, and about food, and about how we look. Maths is one of the last places where it is still perfectly acceptable to announce, cheerfully, in front of a seven-year-old, that people like us simply can't do it.
It lands as sympathy. You are taking the blame off them, making it hereditary, letting them off the hook. Most of us have said some version of it.
About 35 per cent of British adults say that having to do maths in everyday situations makes them feel anxious, and roughly a third say they would not feel confident helping a child with maths homework. Nobody says "I was never any good at reading." Maths is the one subject where announcing your own failure counts as being supportive.
A run of studies over the past ten years has looked at what happens next. Some of it has been argued over and partly knocked down. What is left is still worth knowing.
The feeling travels, the ability doesn't
In 2015 a team at the University of Chicago, led by Erin Maloney, followed nearly 440 children through their first two school years. They measured how much maths the children picked up over the year, how anxious they felt about it, and how their parents felt about numbers.The children of maths-anxious parents learnt less maths across the year and ended it more anxious. The detail that got the headlines was this: it showed up mainly when those anxious parents were helping with homework often. Help less, and the link faded.
What made no difference at all was how good the parents actually were at maths. Their own knowledge didn't predict anything. The feeling travelled. The ability didn't.
That finding turned into advice: if numbers make you nervous, hand the homework over to someone else. Then a much larger study tested it, with 3,018 children across 242 classes, measured at the start and end of the year. The homework part did not hold up. The researchers could not reproduce it.
What they found instead was the plainer and more awkward version. Children of maths-anxious parents did a little worse and felt a little more anxious, whether or not those parents sat down with the worksheet. So stepping away isn't the fix.
Why nerves make you worse at sums
There is a decent explanation for how this works. Doing a sum in your head needs a sort of mental notepad: you hold 47 up there while you work out what to carry. Worry takes up room on the same notepad. So an anxious child performs below what they actually know, gets it wrong, and reads the wrong answer as proof that they can't do maths. The belief keeps feeding itself.Researchers at Cambridge asked 1,757 children in Years 4 to 7 about this, in schools across the south east of England. Of the children with high maths anxiety, 77 per cent were normal or high achievers on their ordinary school maths tests. The anxiety was not a readout of ability. It mostly wasn't even tracking it.
Asked when it started, children in that study pointed at a bad test result, or at the moment they noticed a friend or a sibling was ahead of them. Maths, they said, was the subject that felt harder than the others.
And it is becoming more common. Across the OECD, the share of 15-year-olds saying they get very nervous doing maths problems rose from 31 per cent in 2012 to 39 per cent in 2022. Two-thirds now worry about getting poor marks in it.
Who else is in the room
In 2010, Sian Beilock and colleagues followed 17 teachers of five to seven year olds for a year. At the start, there was no connection between how anxious a teacher felt about maths and how her class performed.By the summer there was. The more anxious the teacher, the more likely the girls in her class were to agree that boys are good at maths and girls are good at reading, and the lower those girls' maths scores were. The boys were unaffected.
It is a small study, it was done in American classrooms, and it has been picked apart since. But it points the same way as everything else here. Children work out who is allowed to be good at maths by watching the adults nearest them, and not from what those adults say about maths in general. From how they behave when a number turns up.
That is worth sitting with if you have ever said the sentence in front of a daughter.
The small thing that worked
The most encouraging study in this pile is also the least ambitious. Published in Science in 2015, it gave 587 children in their first year of school a tablet loaded with an app of short number stories to read with a parent at bedtime. A smaller group got a bedtime reading app instead.The maths group gained roughly the equivalent of three extra months of maths over the year. The biggest gains went to the children whose parents were the most anxious about maths. Using it about once a week was enough to register.
There were no drills and no times tables in it. It was a short story with numbers in it, read together, the way you would read anything else at bedtime. Which suggests that the thing being repaired wasn't the maths. It was the atmosphere around the maths.
You don't have to get better at maths to stop passing yours on. Mostly you have to stop narrating. "I was never any good at this" can become "I find this bit hard too, let's work it out", which is truer anyway and costs the child nothing.
We have learnt to be careful about what we say in front of children about our own bodies, and about food, and about how we look. Maths is one of the last places where it is still perfectly acceptable to announce, cheerfully, in front of a seven-year-old, that people like us simply can't do it.
Sources & Further Reading