Why So Many Parents Feel Anxious About Teaching Maths
When I was teaching, there was one comment I heard more than almost any other, usually said quietly, often with a small laugh attached to soften it. "I was never any good at maths myself." Parents would say it when I praised their child’s effort in maths, or at parents' evenings. It came from confident, capable people who ran households, held down jobs and clearly loved their children fiercely. But maths brought out something different.
That comment has stuck with me for years, and now I'm seeing the same worry play out in a new place, in the comments under parenting posts online. "How am I supposed to help with this when I never understood it myself?".
Where this feeling actually comes from
For a lot of us, maths at school was taught as a subject with one right answer and one right way to get there. If you got there differently, or slower, or needed it explained twice, it could feel like you simply weren't a "maths person." That label tends to stick. Decades later, it's still there, quietly, waiting to resurface the moment your own child needs help with numbers.
Here's the thing though. That experience was about a particular way of teaching maths, not about your actual ability to think mathematically. You use maths every day, working out if you have time to stop for a coffee, splitting a bill, deciding if you've got enough ingredients for dinner. The confidence gap isn't a maths gap. It's a memory of how maths used to be taught.
What your child actually needs from you
Your child doesn't need you to have all the answers. They need someone willing to sit with a question and say "I'm not sure, let's work it out together." That single sentence teaches more than a correct answer ever could. It shows your child that not knowing is a normal part of learning, not something to be embarrassed about, and that's often the exact thing that was missing for a lot of us at school.
Maths at home doesn't have to look anything like maths at school. It can look like counting out plates for dinner, comparing who has more grapes, working out how many steps it is to the front door. Every one of those moments is your child building number sense, and none of them require you to remember how to do long division.
Two simple ways to build confidence, yours and theirs
Say numbers out loud as you use them
"We need four plates." "There's two minutes left." "You've got three grapes on your plate." Every time you narrate a number like this, you're proving to yourself that maths is already part of your day, not a subject you need to prepare for or feel ready for. And your child hears numbers used naturally, in real moments, which builds their own comfort with them too. No planning, no activity needed, just noticing what's already there.
Say "let's find out" instead of guessing
When your child asks a maths question you're not sure of, resist the urge to guess an answer just to seem confident. Say "I'm not sure, let's find out together" and work it out with them, even if that just means counting on your fingers. This does double duty. It shows your child that not knowing isn't something to hide, and it takes the pressure off you to perform, which is often where the confidence gap actually lives.
The bottom line
You don't need to have loved maths at school to raise a child who feels good about it. You just need to be willing to explore alongside them, without pretending to have it all figured out. That willingness is worth more than any right answer.