
Parents' Math Anxiety Is Contagious to Their Kids - euske
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/square-root-of-kids-math-anxiety-their-parents-help/
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stdbrouw
Another thing is that even very basic math concepts can be hard to explain in
a way that makes sense to kids. For example, if you have to explain why
multiplying unlike fractions works one way whereas adding unlike fractions
requires an entirely different procedure, lots of parents have no idea other
than "that's just how I learned it."

The transcripts included in the research paper "Mathematics in the Home" (PDF:
[http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicole_Else-
Quest/public...](http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicole_Else-
Quest/publication/222680508_Mathematics_in_the_home_Homework_practices_and_motherchild_interactions_doing_mathematics/links/0a85e530ca35b49b3b000000.pdf))
are really telling. Parents who are comfortable with math will tend to ask
their kids questions and give little hints when they're stuck, whereas parents
that are uncomfortable with math will tend to just blurt out the solution
whenever things are taking too long, or encourage strict adherence to one
particular heuristic for finding a solution. Over the long haul, the result is
that mathematics will start to look like just one long arbitrary list of
rules. Of course, that's no fun, and so kids of mathophobes become mathophobes
themselves.

Plenty of help available, though, for people who do want to help their kids:
"Help Your Kids with Math: A visual problem solver for kids and parents",
"Math Power: How to Help Your Child Love Math, Even If You Don't", "What Can I
Do to Help My Child with Math When I Don't Know Any Myself?"

~~~
atroyn
A deeper problem is that math is almost always taught as a list of rules in
the first place, frequently by teachers who do not themselves understand the
underlying concepts. Teachers who only remember the procedures can of course
only teach procedures. Most adults don't even remember any procedures, since
they have no need to in daily life.

This condemns children to repeat the cycle. They (completely rationally)
decide that they're just 'not math people' because they can't follow lists of
arbitrary seeming steps to do something that no one they have ever met ever
actually does in daily life. And some of them grow up to be teachers
themselves.

~~~
Thriptic
> A deeper problem is that math is almost always taught as a list of rules in
> the first place, frequently by teachers who do not themselves understand the
> underlying concepts. Teachers who only remember the procedures can of course
> only teach procedures

Sigh, your statement reminds me of one time when I was in 6th grade geometry
and was asked to complete this one proof. The problem was intended to get us
to apply a concept we had been taught verbatim, but I couldn't remember it
well and so I completed the proof a different way by extrapolating other basic
concepts we had gone over into a method we had not been taught. I remember
feeling very proud of myself when I finished, as I had created something which
in my 12 year old eyes was a "novel proof". I ended up being given 0 points on
the problem because I did not complete my proof using cookie cutter methods we
had been taught (even though my proof was correct and it was not specified
that I use a particular concept in the instructions).

I remember complaining to my teacher about how this was unfair and she kept
saying something akin to "well you didn't do the problem the right way". The
incident pretty much killed any interest I had in math, which wasn't rekindled
until I stumbled upon machine learning recently in my 20s.

~~~
Xcelerate
That kind of story makes me irrationally upset. That's horrible — killing a
child's interest in math because they didn't do the problem the "right way".
It's completely antagonistic to the spirit of the field. Teachers shouldn't be
teaching subjects if they don't understand them.

~~~
zeidrich
Its these kind of experiences that I want to learn to teach my child to make
it through.

There are a lot of other people out there who will unknowingly be very
discouraging, to both children and adults, but their opinions have no bearing
on our ability to learn. I remember being in music class in grade 1 and it was
my absolute favorite class. Near the end of the year I was told that I wasn't
very good at singing by my teacher. I never tried to sing again, but I learned
later that I have good pitch and a decent voice. I am not really interested in
singing now, but I might have learned a different set of skills if I didn't
avoid it.

Is there a way that I could have been prepared so that being told by the
person I looked up to for validation, that I was no good wouldn't make me stop
trying to improve?

I don't know about that, but if there's a way to teach that, it would
definitely be a good lesson. It would certainly be nice if teachers didn't do
things like that, but even if you could guarantee they didn't, you won't stop
the bullies or the critics or anyone other hater as you get older.

~~~
mikeash
As they say, don't let your schooling get in the way of your education.

To the grandparent: I don't think getting upset is at all irrational.

------
pjmorris
And, likely, vice-versa. I was struggling with modulo artihmetic in 7th grade,
and came home and explained so to my mom. She said 'It's like a clock', and I
got it immediately.

~~~
erroneousfunk
My mom was the same way. I remember a particularly challenging (to me)
elementary school word problem, involving a fictional system of currency. She
went to a box of Trix cereal, we decided which cereal pieces corresponded to
which fictional currency units in the word problem, and then we started doing
transactions with the cereal, until I finally figured out the answer to the
problem.

I found out later that she hated math, and thought she was bad at it (she
really wasn't, but that's another issue entirely...). However, she never let
me see that, which was fantastic.

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BurningFrog
I smell a Blank Slate Fallacy.

Math talent, like other intelligence, is inheritable. So until you've pried
apart nature and nurture, the simplest assumption is that these kids are bad
at math because they don't have much talent for it.

Google Turkheimer's Three Laws of Behavior Genetics for more on this often
neglected field.

~~~
Wintamute
Indeed, well said. Seems just as plausible, if not more so, that the anxiety
is a symptom of poor familial aptitude for mathematics than the cause itself.
But that's a thoughtcrime these days, so best not mention it ...

~~~
dnissley
But until we know something provable about genetics and mathematical aptitude
this line of thought is just hand-waving. You still don't know any better than
anybody else why somebody is having a hard time with math.

~~~
Wintamute
That's why I said it seems "just as plausible" as the alternative. Its the
article that's making the more definitive statements, not me. Besides, I think
there's a reasonable amount of science that makes the argument for genetics
over nurture quite compelling, but 20 years of malpractice and misdirection in
the social sciences obfuscated that.

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mewse
I wonder whether there is anything specific to Math in this, or whether we're
looking at a broader trend, which might perhaps be phrased as "Parents'
academic anxiety is contagious to their kids"? Or maybe even "Parents' anxiety
is contagious to their kids"?

Does this work the same way for parents who aren't comfortable talking or
reasoning about (for example) history? Or literature? Or is math a special
case that works differently from other subjects taught in schools?

There's a useful note in the article that maths-anxious parents didn't affect
their children's reading ability. But it'd be fascinating to know whether (for
example) poorly-literate parents have an effect on their children's reading
ability, independent of other factors.

~~~
amelius
Or what about "mathy" parents that show anxiety for the soft sciences?

~~~
analog31
Is soft science anxiety a thing?

~~~
grayclhn
Anxiety about writing or public speaking is. Not quite the soft sciences, but
maybe close. (I think "outright dismissal" of the soft sciences is more likely
than "anxiety" and maybe that's the point you were making.)

------
leni536
> So much for good intentions. The more the math-anxious parents tried to work
> with their children, the worse their children did in math, slipping more
> than a third of a grade level behind their peers.

OK, assume they found a negative correlation between grades and the amount of
help of the parents. I'm not buying this explanation. Sure, if your kid has
worse grades then you help him/her more on the critical subject.

~~~
stdbrouw
This is the study I believe they are referring to:
[http://cogdevlab.uchicago.edu/sites/cogdevlab.uchicago.edu/f...](http://cogdevlab.uchicago.edu/sites/cogdevlab.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/Maloney%20et%20al%20\(2015\)%20Intergenerational%20effects.pdf)
(PDF)

> we tested the interaction between parents’ math anxiety and the frequency of
> parents’ homework help while controlling for students’ grade, gender,
> beginning-of-year math achievement, and beginning-of-year math anxiety

So the study controls for baseline performance. It's definitely possible that
some selection bias remains, but it looks like a reasonably well-executed
study on a large sample (438 children) and I wouldn't discount the results out
of hand.

------
tempodox
Aren't practically all of parents' anxieties contagious to their kids?

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iamthepieman
My wife and I homeschool our kids. My wife and I were also both homeschooled.
We both did Saxon math through highschool. For me it was hard, boring and
great. After about 9th grade I basically just opened up the textbook and
worked through the thirty or so problems every day. They were repetitive
lessons with a short paragraph about the concept and how to do an example
problem or two. There was not much detail or explanation in the textbook. This
forced me to work out the underlying concepts myself and I knew trigonometry,
algebra and basic mental math better than most of my peers by the time I went
to college.

My wife is more of a visual hands on learner and suffered through the same
text books. In college she had a series of bad professors (like, cancelling
class because the professor had a hangover bad) and this just cemented her
view that she was bad at math.

All that long exposition is to say that people learn different ways and a
"bad" method may result in a good outcome. Learning is a complex interplay of
teacher, student, material and presentation that can be different for every
person.

When I teach my kids I like to have them all in the same lesson even though
they are different ages and doing different levels of work. The primary
purpose of this is to just talk about math, make it normal to think and reason
about it and show that it's not scary. Math concepts are often taught as a
series of ever increasing obstacles to be jumped over. You jump over them
until you reach a ten foot wall that you just can't summon the mental power to
leap over. Then you are bad at math.

But math is more like a hike. you start out in the foothills where even your 5
year old can keep up with the rest of the family. Each footstep is a little
closer to the peak. You are making progress and learning even if you only make
it to the first mile marker. You get fitter and accumulate some equipment and
technical skills for the mountaineering sections higher up as you go. It's
challenging but fun and you have a sense of accomplishment no matter how high
you are. As you get higher the vistas opened up to you show you the world in
ways you could never see lower down and give you motivation to go forward
towards higher peaks and better views.

~~~
douche
Saxon was a great math program. I worked my way through the Algebra 2 book in
7th grade, and coasted on that until I reached college. For some reason (ahem-
one of the teachers helped write it-ahem) my high school used a different,
much shittier math program. Until the second half of my senior year AP
calculus class, I didn't have to cover anything that I hadn't done in the
Algebra 2 book.

Particularly for things like manipulating and simplifying systems of
equations, the Saxon program was great, simply because it was built on
repetition and practice - you would work through dozens of problems of a
particular category over time. The other thing that was very nice about the
Saxon program was that it would revisit older concepts - the problem sets
would not just be on the current chapter concepts, you'd also have to work
through material that had been covered over the previous 15-20 chapters. My
mother is a special education teacher, and she's had success even with
children that have serious memory deficits, because the repetition will pound
the knowledge through into short, medium and long-term memory.

~~~
iamthepieman
Yes the repetition can be really boring and some of the problems, even the
easier ones from previous lessons can take a while to solve. But I still
remember the concepts from algebra 1,2 and trig and can pull them out and
apply them in real world situations. I had to build a gaga pit[0] for my towns
school just this past weekend and some basic trig definitely came in handy
there.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ga-ga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ga-ga)

------
Chinjut
That quiz at the end makes it almost impossible not to be classified as math
anxious to some extent; answering even a single question (out of ten) with
anything other than "Not anxious at all" (on its five point scale) gets one
classified as "A little bit math-anxious" and told "Hey, who isn't? You don't
panic over math, but perhaps you don't like it very much, either".

------
xacaxulu
I'd assume parents X anxiety, or fear, or anger would be contagious to
children in general. But this does bring back memories of my dad (general
contractor) getting mad at my homework and calling for my mom (engineer) to
come help hahaha. It was Calculus.

------
hadeharian
Contagious? Sure about that? Have you ruled out epigenetics?

~~~
jerf
Epigenetics isn't a magic wand; unless you really think people have "math
receptors" in their body that will tune their epigenetics to be even worse at
math in the future if they're frustrated today, and then pass it on to their
children, it's a silly theory.

Moreover, most people have it _exactly_ backwards... to the extent passing
epigenetics to your children makes sense at all from an evolutionary
perspective, it is passing _adaptations_ , not _weaknesses_. If a parent has a
hard time finding food, the stress of being hungry passes on to a child to
make them smaller, i.e., _less needing of food_ because they're not going to
try to grow as much. Epigenetics is not "If you break a leg, your child will
be born with a broken leg". That's just Lamarkianism, and Lamarkianism is
_still false_.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Moreover, most people have it exactly backwards... to the extent passing
> epigenetics to your children makes sense at all from an evolutionary
> perspective, it is passing adaptations, not weaknesses.

While I don't think epigenetic math anxiety is particularly plausible (for,
basically, the "math receptor" reason you state earlier), an adaptation in
general may turn out to be a weakness in a particular case. If, say, it was
possible to epigenetically pass on stress triggers (an "adaptation", because
having a stronger, quicker fight-or-flight response to a particular
environmental condition that is a frequent stress source might generally be an
advantage) this might manifest as a weakness in some particular cases. Now,
because its hard to believe that there are "math receptors", it seems unlikely
that even if this was possible in some general sense, that it would be
possible in some way where "math" was the specific sensitized trigger, but if
it was...

------
roel_v
"Math anxiety affects not only test taking and grades but also self-esteem and
everyday computational skills. (How many gallons of paint for two coats of
your living room? Can you convert a double-layer cake recipe into a triple-
layer?)"

Is this really a thing? Are there adults (except for those in the < 2nd std
dev range, who are near-but-not-quite-at mental disability-level) who cannot
calculate the amount of paint needed to paint a room?

~~~
DanBC
What? Yes, of course it's a thing. I meet people like that _every_ day.

A better example of following the rules without understanding would be
percentages. Many people could tell you what buttons they push to answer "What
is 37% of 240?" But many people would be lost if you asked them "What is 84 as
a percentage of 270?"

Or "This product now costs £230. It has had a 20% discount applied. How much
did it used to cost, before the discount?"

~~~
zamalek
I think that "learning to regurgitate" information is partially to blame for
these type of scenarios. Kids are encouraged to "do past-papers" and other
such practice-based learning techniques; while these techniques may be a
component of establishing knowledge they are most certainly not a singular
solution. A person who has only done past-papers only knows how to be a
parrot, and a parrot can't make the _creative_ leap from "% of X" to "X over Y
as %."

People I went to school could definitely work out the paint or percentage
problems, but for a really good majority of them: only because they faced
those exact questions in exams/tests.

------
adwf
More importantly, why are parents doing their kids homework anyway? They're
never gonna learn - how - to learn, if the answer is always to ask mum and
dad.

~~~
stdbrouw
The trouble with traditional homework is that you have to wait a long time
before you get feedback, at the earliest it'll be the next day. This makes it
hard to correct misunderstandings. So parents helping with homework is a great
idea, not because pupils shouldn't learn to take charge of their own learning,
but because homework kind of sucks as a tool for learning.

~~~
jerf
"at the earliest it'll be the next day."

One of the interesting hard mathematical results to come out of generalized
learning theory, as used by machine learning, is that there is a fundamental
relationship between the speed of feedback and the ability to learn. It is not
merely a matter of "willpower" to learn from temporally distant feedback, it
is fundamentally, irreducibly harder, and there's no way to "correct" it
because it's not even wrong.

Homework _grading_ (note the emphasis) as a _learning_ mechanism has such a
delay that its learning rate is effectively zero. And what feedback you get is
often not even very much beyond _WRONG!_ , which is not exactly rich with
information itself.

Homework is only useful for the feedback and learning you get while doing it,
and for the ability to assess the student because we live & die on
assessments, give us a direct choice between assessment and learning and the
system will generally prefer the former. So, I won't say "homework is useless"
but we could save everybody a lot of time if we only checked that it was done
and spot-graded it for assessment, rather than making the teacher laboriously,
yet nearly entirely uselessly, grade stacks of homework.

