How to talk about maths at home

I want to start this episode by telling you about a parent I worked with a while ago.

I'll call her Sarah and her daughter Amy.

When Sarah first came to me, she described 15-year-old Amy as lazy.

She used that word more than once.

Sarah felt that Amy could do the work when she wanted to, but that she just didn't want to.

Every homework session had become a battle of wills, Sarah pushing, Amy resisting, both of them ending up frustrated and neither of them any closer to the maths actually getting done.

Something shifted for Sarah after the assessment process.

Instead of telling Amy to just find some focus and get on with it, she started asking Amy what she was actually finding difficult.

Changing her question from why haven't you finished this to something closer to how does this feel for you and what's the bit that trips you up the most? And Amy told her.

It turned out there was a lot going on that Sarah hadn't seen because she hadn't been looking for it.

She'd been looking for effort or the lack of it.

Once Sarah understood what Amy was up against, several things happened, and they happened in a particular order.

She started to empathize with what Amy was dealing with rather than judging her for not dealing with it well enough.

That empathy changed what Sarah did next.

She stopped adding pressure at home.

The reminders of you need to try harder, the sense that maths was a test that Amy kept failing at in front of her own mother stopped.

And she started applying pressure somewhere more useful at school on Amy's behalf.

Amy still had her maths difficulties to contend with that hadn't changed but she was no longer managing her mother's disappointment on top of it.

Sarah was the one raising it with the school gaining the right support for Amy having the harder conversations with the teacher.

What surprised Sarah most was that Amy started doing her homework.

Not for long.

The sessions were short, but they were productive in a way they hadn't been for a long time.

The thing that Sarah told me she hadn't expected, and the thing that I think matters most for this episode, is what happened to the two of them as mother and daughter.

Their relationship had become adversarial.

This was how Sarah described it months later.

And their relationship didn't just improve, it deepened.

They got closer than they'd been before any of this started.

I want to pause here for a moment because I think it tells us something important about what these conversations are actually doing.

Welcome to Safety in Numbers, a podcast for parents of children who struggle with maths, including those with dyscalculia or a specific learning difficulty in maths.

In each episode, we explore what might be happening when maths feels difficult and what parents can do to better understand and support their child.