I'm bad at math. How do I help my child without passing it on?

You can pass math anxiety to your child, but not the way most parents fear. It doesn't travel through genes or through your child noticing you're nervous. In the one large study that tracked it, it traveled through homework help: children of math-anxious parents learned less math over the year and became more anxious themselves only when those parents helped with math homework often. Parents who dreaded math and mostly stayed out of the worksheet did no harm. So the answer isn't to get better at math or to get more involved. It's to change the kind of involvement: less correcting at the table, more short and playful math talk away from it, and a few sentences retired from your vocabulary.

Can I really pass my math anxiety to my child?

Here's the study. In 2015, researchers at the University of Chicago followed 438 first and second graders and their parents through a school year. They measured the children's math skill and math anxiety in the fall and again in the spring, and asked parents how nervous math made them and how often they helped with math homework. The children of math-anxious parents who helped often ended the year with smaller math gains and more math anxiety than other children. The children of math-anxious parents who rarely helped looked like everyone else. Reading, used as a comparison, showed no such pattern.

The researchers were careful to say they don't know exactly what those parents did differently, and they allow that genes may play some part. But the fact that the effect appeared only with frequent homework help points at something in the help itself: an anxious parent's explanations may be muddled, their frustration visible, their instinct to take over strong, and their comments ("ugh, I was never good at this") contagious. None of that requires being bad at math. It requires being tense about it, at the table, often.

One more thing the researchers noted: it's socially acceptable to say "I hate math" in a way it would never be to say "I hate reading." Children hear that difference.

What should I do instead of helping with homework?

The same lab ran a second study that answers this. In 2015 they gave 587 first-grade families a tablet with an app of short bedtime math story problems, and a comparison group a reading app. The families who used the math app often had children who ended the year almost three months ahead in math of similar children in the reading group, and even once-a-week use helped. The children who gained the most were the ones whose parents were most anxious about math.

Read that against the first study and the lesson is clear. The anxious parents who did worksheet-style help made things worse. The anxious parents who did a few minutes of playful, low-stakes math talk, with no grade and no right way to explain, made things better. What changed wasn't the parent's math ability; it was the format.

So the practical rule for a parent who dreads math: separate homework from practice. Homework belongs to the school. When your child is stuck on it, your job is small and specific (below), and the time cap is short. Practice belongs to you, and it should look nothing like homework: talk about numbers while cooking, counting stairs, sharing snacks, guessing how many, estimating prices. Short, spoken, a little silly, no worksheet, no marking.

What do I say when my child asks for help and I don't know how to do it?

Four things, in order, none of which require you to know the answer.

"Read it to me." Many problems solve themselves when a child reads them aloud slowly, and if not, you now know where they're stuck.

"What do you know for sure?" This turns a blank into a start. It's also a question you can ask about any problem in any grade without understanding it yourself.

"How did your teacher show you?" The method on the page is probably not the one you learned, and the child has seen it. Let them teach it to you. Teaching it is the best practice they'll get, and you've just modeled that not knowing is fine.

"Let's write down where we got stuck and ask tomorrow." A note to the teacher ("stuck on #4, the regrouping one") ends the session without pretending and gets the child the help they need from the person trained to give it.

Here is what it sounds like with a second grader and a parent who hasn't seen "make a ten" since never:

• Child"I don't get this one. 8 plus 7."
• Parent"Read me what it says to do."
• Child"It says make a ten first."
• Parent"How did your teacher do that?"
• Child"You take some from the 7 to make the 8 into 10."
• Parent"How many do you take?"
• Child"Two. Then there's 5 left. Ten and five... 15."
• Parent"You just taught me that."

The parent didn't explain anything, didn't get it wrong, and the child did the math. If you want to know why the method exists, ask the teacher or look it up later, on your own time, not with a child watching you struggle. (The method itself is simple and worth knowing: the age-by-age guide to finger counting walks through making ten and the other first-grade strategies.)

What should I stop saying?

Four sentences that feel like solidarity and land as something else.

"I was never good at math either." It's meant as comfort. The child hears that math ability is a thing you have or don't, and that they're in the "don't" family. The researchers' own advice is to watch how you talk about your math fear in front of your child.

"I hate this new math." The child has to do the new math tomorrow, with the teacher who taught it. Now they also know you think it's stupid. Keep the opinion for the adults.

"Just give me the answer and I'll check it." This makes you the examiner, which is the role the research suggests anxious parents are worst at. Be the audience instead: "show me how you did it."

"It's easy." If it were easy they'd have done it. Try "this one's tricky, let's look at it together."

And one sentence to add: "I had to practice this a lot." True for everyone, and it tells the child math is a thing you practice, not a thing you are.

What if I'm homeschooling and math is the subject I dread?

You're far from alone; "I'm terrified of teaching it" is one of the most common sentences on homeschool forums. Three things help.

Use a program that does the explaining and treat yourself as the coach, not the teacher: you sit beside the child, keep the session short, and ask the four questions above when they're stuck. Learn one lesson ahead, on your own, so the child never watches you meet the material for the first time. And keep the session short enough to end before anyone's patience does; for a first grader that's about 20 to 30 minutes, and how much math a day, by grade has the rest of the numbers.

This is also what Mathwell was built for. Mathwell is a browser-based K–5 math tutor that reads every problem aloud and teaches with hints instead of answers: a character called the Tutor reads each problem to the child and, when the child is stuck, offers a smaller step rather than the solution, so the explaining and the correcting don't have to come from a parent who dreads both. You can sit beside the child as the person who's interested, which is the role the research says helps. Anyone can try the demo lesson without signing up; after that there's a 7-day free trial with a card on file, then $19 a month, $99 a year, or $169 for a three-year K–5 pass. It's for kindergarten through fifth grade only, and the child answers by tapping or typing, not by speaking. The bedtime math talk still has to come from you, and it's the part the research is surest about.

Will my child end up anxious about math anyway?

Not if the math in your house is mostly pleasant. The children in the bedtime-math study whose parents were the most anxious gained the most, which means an anxious parent who changes the format can do more good than a confident one who doesn't. Anxiety about math is common, it isn't a measure of intelligence, and it responds to exactly the things above: low stakes, short sessions, and a parent who treats being stuck as normal rather than as a verdict. When a session does end in tears, what to say when your child cries over math homework is the script.