The Surprising Thing That Predicts Your Child's Maths Ability

If you wanted to predict how good a five-year-old will be at maths in ten years, what would you test? How quickly they learn their times tables? Whether they can add up? How fast they count?

None of those things, it turns out. The early skills we associate most with maths - quick recall, speedy arithmetic - are surprisingly poor predictors of long-term mathematical ability. What does predict it is something most parents would never guess: whether your child can imagine what the world looks like through someone else's eyes.

The Toy Car Experiment

There is a test, based on work by the psychologist Jean Piaget, where you set up a scene in front of a young child - say, a toy car crash with figures watching from different positions around a table. You ask the child to describe what happened. Then you ask them to tell the story from someone else's point of view. What did the figure standing on the hill see? What about the one behind the car?

Some five-year-olds can do this easily. They shift their mental position, describe the scene from angles they never actually saw, and build a different version of events for each character. Other children find it baffling. Every character saw what they saw. Every perspective is their own.

That ability - to mentally rotate your viewpoint, to hold one scene in your head and see it differently depending on where you stand - turns out to be one of the strongest early indicators of future mathematical thinking. A 2025 study published in Developmental Science confirmed that both mental rotation and perspective-taking in primary-age children significantly predict maths performance, even after accounting for other cognitive abilities.

Why Would Seeing From a Doll's Eyes Help With Fractions?

The connection sounds odd until you think about what maths actually requires. Consider the number eight. To a young child, eight is a character - a thing with a fixed identity. But in maths, what eight does depends entirely on context. Multiplying by eight is a completely different operation from dividing by eight or subtracting eight. The digit stays the same. Its role changes.

That is perspective-taking, just with numbers instead of toy figures. The child who can mentally step into different viewpoints in a play scene is practising the same underlying skill they will need when algebra asks them to see x as a different value depending on the equation. Mathematical thinking, at its core, is about flexibility - seeing the same information from multiple angles and understanding that context changes meaning.

A meta-analysis of 23 studies covering more than 35,000 children found that cognitive flexibility - the ability to switch between different mental frameworks - is significantly linked to maths performance. The link was strongest in younger children, suggesting these flexible thinking patterns matter most in the early years when mathematical foundations are being laid.

The Missing Piece in the Curriculum

Despite this evidence, spatial reasoning barely features in most school maths curricula. A 2024 report by the Royal Society's Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education called spatial reasoning a "missing piece" in how we teach maths, noting that activities like mental rotation, spatial visualisation, and perspective-taking are rarely given dedicated time in classrooms.

This matters because spatial skills are not fixed. They are trainable. A meta-analysis published in Developmental Psychology, covering 29 controlled studies with nearly 4,000 participants, found that spatial training produced meaningful improvements in children's maths performance. The effect was strongest when training used physical materials - blocks, puzzles, construction toys - rather than screens.

Researchers at the University of Surrey found that children's ability to build with LEGO had a strong and consistent relationship with their maths competence across numeracy, geometry, and problem-solving. The connection was not about following instructions on a box. It was about understanding how parts relate to wholes and how flat shapes become three-dimensional objects.

What This Looks Like at Home

The good news is that the kind of play that builds these skills is not complicated or expensive. It is the stuff many children already do - or would do, given the chance.

Building with blocks and construction toys. Jigsaw puzzles. Drawing maps of their bedroom or garden. Playing with tangrams. Even simple conversations: "What do you think the cat can see from up there?" or "If you were standing behind the house, what would look different?"

These activities build the mental muscles that formal maths will later rely on. A child who has spent years rotating shapes in their hands, imagining hidden sides of objects, and describing scenes from different viewpoints arrives at fractions and algebra with a kind of intuitive flexibility that no amount of times-table drilling can provide.

This does not mean arithmetic practice is worthless. Children need to know their number facts. But the evidence suggests we have the emphasis backwards. We drill the memorisation early and hope the deeper understanding follows. The research points the other way: build the spatial and flexible thinking first, and the numbers come more naturally.

Seeing Differently

There is something poetic about the finding that mathematical ability begins not with numbers, but with the capacity to see the world through someone else's eyes. It connects maths to empathy, to imagination, to play - things we do not usually associate with equations and formulas.

Next time your child is arranging toy figures and narrating an elaborate scene from six different angles, they are not just playing. They are building the kind of mind that will one day look at a problem and instinctively see it from more than one direction. That, it turns out, is what being good at maths actually means.