Which Math Category Does Your Child Fit Into?

I was a math hater. My anxiety began early in my school career and lasted until I became a teacher. I could not have told you years ago why I hated math, but as a teacher and tutor, I have noticed different types of math haters in my students. They generally fall into three categories: the math-anxious, the math-helpless, and the math-guesser-and-checker. If your child is not a numbers person, perhaps he or she fits into one of these math-hater categories.  

The math-anxious

My dad still tells my friends about how I cried every night as he tried to help me with my math homework. Sorry dad, but the same strategy in a louder voice did not work for me, and in fact, it increased my math anxiety.

My dad’s frustration with me because I did not understand his explanations increasingly fueled my fear of math. Even though as an adult, I have a new confidence about my skill and understanding of numbers, I still get nervous when I am put on the spot with my peers. This anxiety is real, as recent studies have shown. It is an emotional brain response that actually impairs one’s ability to learn, remember, and problem solve.

What’s worse, an adult’s math anxiety can be passed on to a child. This is true of both teachers and parents. To help your math-anxious child:

• Help them to relax. When we get upset about something, any efforts to continue working in that area become useless until the stress of the situation goes away. Turn attention to a less stressful topic and return to the math problems after emotions have cooled down.   
• Keep yourself calm. Your frustration becomes your child’s frustration.  
• Walk away when helping them with homework if frustration arises. Let your child process on his own and then return to support him when he is not as upset.  
• Rephrase your suggestions of help or try a new strategy. The same suggestion in a louder voice creates a stressful relationship between you and your child. If one way isn’t making sense, try another way: a picture, a “trick," a model, manipulatives, a story, anything to break the barrier of understanding in a new, creative way.  
• Praise your child’s effort when she does a problem correctly and then require her to try another similar problem on her own immediately to reinforce the concept and the positive feelings of success.
• Work on number sense. Perhaps the math basics are missing. Spend some fun time learning math tricks or building basic number sense so more advanced math topics are not as challenging.
• For higher levels of math, allow a calculator! If basic math functions are the stumbling block, teaching your child how to solve a problem with a calculator is the key to math success and what adults do in real life anyway. A tool like a calculator allows your child to be a mathematician, even without memorizing the facts.
• Keep your own math-anxiety to yourself! Research shows that girls embody gender biases against math and learn to think of themselves as incapable of math if the women in their lives feel the same way. This is true of parents and teachers. If you say you are not good at math, your daughter might accept this as true of herself without even trying. Do not promote such gender stereotypes about math and free your daughter to achieve higher in math than you did.  
• For more on the science of math anxiety and to see the research referred to in this article, click here.

The math-helpless

“I don’t know how to do this,” or “I’ll just put any answer and not care if it is right.”

These are the thoughts of the learned math-helpless. These resourceful kiddos know that if they wait long enough, another student will shout out the answer or that mom or dad will come and rescue them, so they never try.

Research shows that once given an answer, the brain forgets about the question. There is no reason to pursue understanding once the answer is reached. Only a mature student will fight this tendency. The math-helpless child is not that student.

I was definitely one of those students who learned early on that if I just waited, someone would tell me the answer, and once the answer was out there, there was no reason to think anymore.  

• Encourage your child to trust himself. For whatever reason, he does not believe that he can know. Rebuild confidence to combat learned helplessness.
• Talk through math problems. If your child’s first thought is that she doesn’t know how to do something, prove to her that she does know. Your child knows more than she lets on, but is trained to not work that hard. Ask guiding questions that lead her to finding her own answers.   
• Do not give in. Make your child work for the answers, and then praise the effort.  
• Returning to gender differences, research that supports separating girls and boys into different math classes stands upon the tendency for boys to process verbally and to shout out answers once they know them. Girls tend to process internally and keeping answers to themselves. In a classroom setting, this means that many children can stop thinking once an answer is blurted out. Although you may not be able to change the classroom environment, you can bring this situation to your child’s attention and teach them that they still need to know how an answer is found or a problem is solved.

The math guesser-and-approval checker

“Is this right?” “How do I do this again?” “4x7 is 26?... 27?... 28?...Yeah, 28!”

These students are masters at reading facial cues and getting answers without working for them. Make them prove the answer to you and show them how to find the answers for themselves.

• Focus on math processes rather than memorization. If your child knows why 4x7 is 28, math becomes more logical and less of a guessing game.
• Ask your child to tell you why an answer is correct and then give a similar problem right away so she can prove to you (and herself) she knows how to do it on her own.
• “Prove it!” When your child hits on an answer by guessing, make him show you how he arrived at it. This reinforces the thinking that goes into finding answers on his own and holds him accountable to learning the skill.  
• Do not give in and don’t give answers away. Make your child work for the answers, and then praise the effort. If she arrives at the answer by guessing, do not tell her she has found it yet. Go back to the process of how to find the answer and make her find it on her own. Remember, these students are masters of reading facial cues, so keep the same expression even when they hit the right answer so as not to give it away.
• Talk about laziness. When things get hard, we want to run and hide or let someone else do the work for us. Discuss with your child the necessity of learning the concepts and hold them accountable to their work.

As for me and math, I believe if I had a patient teacher helping me figure out why I wasn’t understanding math concepts and then re-teaching me in a way that made sense to me, I would never have hated math as much as I did.

Be patient when working with your child. Don’t raise your voice, and if your child doesn’t understand what you are trying to explain, either explain it in a different way or ask someone else to help out.  

My mother always said math was not for her. I bought into that notion for myself. Turns out, as an adult, I love math and love teaching it!  I was just never forced to realize this. It is socially acceptable to not like math and, as we compare ourselves to other nations, it should not come as a surprise that we are falling behind in math-heavy subjects like engineering and science.

Although numbers may not come to some of us as easily as they do to others, we should not be categorized into those of us who “can” and those who “can’t.” Math really is logic and problem solving. We all “can.” Teaching this to children is my passion.  

Visit www.schoolsurvivalist.com for past articles on stress-management for kids, number sense resources, and effective praise techniques.