“I was never any good at maths either.” It is one of the gentlest sentences a parent can say, and it tends to arrive at exactly the moment a child needs comfort: on a Tuesday evening, beside a laptop showing an online homework task that has marked three answers wrong in a row. The intention is solidarity. What the child often hears is rather different. If a parent who reads, works and runs a household was never any good at maths, then perhaps being bad at maths is something that runs in families, like freckles or short sight.
Few subjects carry this kind of permission to give up. Adults who would be embarrassed to admit they struggle to read will cheerfully announce that they cannot do sums, and children soon absorb the idea that people are either maths people or they are not. Yasmin Sarwar, whose own teaching was recognised with the Pearson Teaching Award in 2011, has spent much of her career with students who arrived convinced they belonged in the second group. Her argument is that the belief does more damage than any gap in knowledge, and that it is far easier to shift than most families assume.
A feeling that travels
The way that belief passes from one generation to the next has been studied with unusual care. In 2015 a team led by Erin Maloney and Sian Beilock at the University of Chicago published a study in Psychological Science that followed 438 children in their first and second years of school in the United States, aged roughly six to eight. The researchers measured how anxious parents felt about maths and how often they helped with maths homework, then tracked the children’s progress across a school year.
When maths-anxious parents helped frequently with homework, their children learned significantly less maths over the year and finished it more anxious about the subject themselves. When the same anxious parents helped less often, the link disappeared. Parents’ maths anxiety made no difference to how well their children read. What was being handed down appeared to be a way of feeling about maths, delivered most powerfully at the point where an adult was trying to help.
None of this means anxious parents should keep their distance. It does suggest that the tone of the help matters as much as the content. A sigh at a long division question, a hurried instruction to do it the way it was done in the 1990s, or a visible flicker of panic can teach a child more about maths than the answer ever will.
The anxious high achiever
The other surprise in the research is who feels this anxiety. It is tempting to assume it belongs to children who are struggling, and a 2018 study from the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at the University of Cambridge found otherwise. Of the children with high maths anxiety, 77 per cent were normal to high achievers on curriculum maths tests. A wider report from the same team, published in 2019, found that UK students commonly traced their anxiety to poor marks, comparisons with siblings or classmates, and the jump in difficulty after moving up to secondary school.
These students are the hardest to spot, because their results look fine. The Cambridge researchers warned that their anxiety could go unnoticed by teachers and parents who looked only at performance, and that it might steer them away from science and technology careers they were perfectly able to pursue. Sarwar recognises the pattern. Some of the students most certain that they are not maths people hold respectable grades, and have simply decided that the effort maths takes them is proof that they lack a gift other people were born with.
Why effort gets misread
That misreading sits at the heart of the myth. Maths is unusually unforgiving in the short term, because one misunderstood step can make everything built on it wobble. A student who missed a few lessons on negative numbers in Year 7 may find algebra baffling in Year 9 without ever working out why. The difficulty feels like a statement about their brain, when it is closer to a missing brick low down in a wall.
The remedy tends to be patient rather than dramatic. Going back to find the missing step, practising it until it feels ordinary and only then returning to the harder material usually does more good than another hour of drilling the topic that is causing the trouble. It also changes the story a student tells about themselves. Struggling because of a gap that can be filled is a very different experience from struggling because of who you are.
What helps at home
For parents, the most useful changes are small ones. The first is to retire the family slogan. Saying “I found maths hard at school, and I wish I had kept at it” is just as accurate as “I was never any good at maths”, and it leaves the door open rather than closing it. The second is to resist the urge to rescue. A child stuck on a problem usually gains more from being asked what they have tried, or what a similar question looked like, than from being shown the method straight away.
It also helps to let maths out of the homework folder. Children watch adults use numbers constantly, in recipes, train times, football scores and the rules of a board game, usually without anyone calling it maths. Pointing it out, or handing over the job of working out how long the drive to a grandparent’s house will take, shows a child that numbers are a tool ordinary people use rather than a test only some people pass.
Sarwar’s experience is that confidence in maths follows small, repeated successes rather than pep talks. A student who solves one problem they thought was beyond them, and notices how they did it, has something more persuasive than any encouragement: the memory of it working. Several of those memories, collected over a term, can quietly undo years of believing the opposite.
A different Tuesday
The phrase will not vanish overnight, and it does not need to. Most adults who say it are really describing how school felt rather than what they are capable of, and many of them use maths competently every day. What matters is what children are allowed to conclude from it.
Yasmin Sarwar’s argument is that being a maths person is less a fixed trait than a habit of carrying on after the first wrong answer, and habits can be learned at any age. On another Tuesday evening, a parent pulls up a chair, leaves the pencil in the child’s hand and asks what they tried first. The question on the screen is the same one that was there ten minutes ago. What has changed is who is expected to solve it.
