Getting your child interested in math — what the research actually says

If you’ve ever watched your child’s face fall at the mention of math homework, you are not alone — and you are not powerless. The way children come to feel about math in the elementary years shapes the choices they make for the rest of their education. The good news, backed by a growing body of research, is that a child’s early relationship with math is far more malleable than most parents believe. It is not fixed at birth. It is not determined by a “math gene.” And it responds, powerfully, to what happens at home.

This guide pulls together what recent studies actually tell us, separates fact from folklore (especially around gender), and gives you concrete things you can do — whether your child is thriving, struggling, or somewhere in between.

The myth of the “math person”

Let’s start by dismantling the single most damaging idea in math education: that some people are “math people” and some people simply are not.

Research on mindset, much of it building on the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, has shown that students who believe ability can grow with effort — a “growth mindset” — consistently outperform those who believe their ability is fixed. When a child (or a parent) believes math ability is something you either have or you don’t, a wrong answer becomes evidence of permanent inadequacy rather than a normal, useful step in learning.

This matters enormously for how you talk about math at home. The phrase “I was never good at math either” — meant to comfort — actually signals to your child that math ability is inherited and that struggle is a sign they’ve hit their ceiling. Replace it with something truer:

The uncomfortable truth about parents and math anxiety

Here is a finding that surprises many parents. A widely cited University of Chicago study led by psychologists Sian Beilock and Susan Levine found that children of math-anxious parents learned less math over the school year and were more likely to become math-anxious themselves — but only when those parents frequently helped with math homework. The researchers concluded the link came from math attitudes, not genetics.

More recent work reinforces this. A 2025 study following nearly 130 children over five years (Loughborough University and Italian collaborators) found that parents’ math anxiety, measured when their children were just three years old, predicted lower numeracy skills years later. As the lead researcher put it, one simple step parents can take is to speak more positively about math and recognize that you don’t need a special talent to be able to learn it.

The takeaway is not “stay away from your child’s math.” It’s that how you show up matters more than how much. If math makes you anxious, the most valuable thing you can do is manage your own language and attitude before you sit down at the kitchen table. Say “let me grab a calculator to check that” instead of “ugh, I hate these.” Model curiosity, not dread.

The gender question: what the studies really show

No conversation about children and math is complete without addressing the persistent belief that boys are naturally better at it than girls. This belief is not just outdated — the research is remarkably clear that it is, for practical purposes, wrong. But there is a real and important gender story here, and understanding it precisely is what lets you protect your child from it.

On ability, the gap is negligible. Across large meta-analyses and international assessments, boys and girls perform at essentially comparable levels in math competence during the elementary years. When researchers measure what children can actually do on objective math tests, the differences between boys and girls are small and often statistically insignificant.

On confidence, the gap is real — and it appears early. This is the crux of it. One review of gender gaps in education summarizes that the female confidence gap in math is nonexistent in the elementary grades but seems to emerge during the middle-school transition, when female confidence in math ability begins to decline. Yet newer research suggests the seeds are planted even earlier. A 2025 Australian study of 78 kindergarteners found that both boys and girls entered school confident in their math abilities — but by the end of that first year, girls already showed decreased confidence compared to boys, despite comparable performance.

Where does the gap come from? Partly from us. This is the part parents most need to hear. A study using twin data (IZA, 2023) found that objective math skills explained only 14–26% of the gender gap in how children rated their own math ability — the rest was, in effect, unearned male overconfidence and unearned female self-doubt. Critically, the same study found that parents were more likely to overestimate boys’ and underestimate girls’ math abilities, and that these gender-biased parental assessments explained a large part of the confidence gap. A separate study of German fourth-graders found the same pattern in teachers: boys reported a significantly more positive math self-concept than girls, even though the two groups scored similarly on actual competence tests.

Put plainly: children generally do not arrive believing boys are better at math. They learn it — from the adults around them, from offhand comments, from who gets called on, from whose struggle is treated as temporary and whose is treated as proof.

The parent’s role: small habits, big effects

You do not need to be good at math to raise a child who is. What you need is to make math feel familiar, useful, and safe. Decades of research point to a handful of high-leverage habits:

Make math part of daily life, and call it math. One reason kids develop math anxiety and not reading anxiety is that families read together for fun long before school, but rarely “do math” for fun. Count Legos. Compare the sizes of measuring cups. Double a cookie recipe and talk about the fractions out loud. At the store, estimate the total or figure out which size is the better deal. The Child Mind Institute’s guidance is explicit: call what you’re doing “math,” so your child comes to feel it’s familiar and accessible rather than a scary school-only subject.

Talk about how you use math. Stanford’s DREME center highlights research in which parents were coached to talk with their children about the relevance of math — how they use it for budgeting, cooking, building, managing time. The children of those parents went on to take more optional math courses and scored better on the math section of the ACT. Simply narrating the math in your own life plants the idea that math is a tool worth having.

When you help with homework, ask more than you tell. The best homework support, according to NWEA’s synthesis of the research, is to encourage, make clear you trust your child’s ability to wrestle with a hard problem, ask open-ended questions, and resist jumping in to show them how. The struggle is not the problem to be solved — the struggle is where the learning happens.

Use games and playful, low-pressure tools. A 2018 study out of Barnard College and the University of Chicago found that children whose families regularly played with a math app at bedtime gained roughly three months of additional math learning over a year — with the biggest benefits for children whose parents were highly math-anxious. Games work partly because they take the focus off right-and-wrong and put it on play, which is exactly what an anxious learner needs.

What to expect from your child’s school

If your child attends public school, it helps to know what the school is actually responsible for delivering — so you can tell the difference between a normal rough patch and a real gap that needs a conversation.

In Florida, elementary math is governed by the B.E.S.T. Standards (Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking), which lay out, grade by grade, exactly what children are expected to learn. A well-functioning school should be teaching to these benchmarks, giving you periodic, understandable feedback on where your child stands relative to them, and flagging early — not in a year-end surprise — when your child is falling behind.

Reasonable things to expect and, if necessary, ask for: clear communication about your child’s current level, specific (not vague) descriptions of what they’re struggling with, and a plan when they’re behind. If your child is anxious or disengaged, it is fair to ask the teacher how math is being made concrete and relevant in class, and what you can reinforce at home. You are a partner in this, not a bystander — and teachers, who are also human and sometimes carry their own math biases, benefit from an engaged parent who asks good questions.

What a school generally cannot do is provide the one-on-one, adaptive, patient repetition that a struggling child often needs to rebuild confidence, or the enrichment an advanced child needs to stay interested. That gap — between what a classroom of 20-plus children can offer and what your individual child needs — is where home support, tutoring, or good adaptive practice tools come in.

What elementary math actually looks like, grade by grade

Here’s a plain-language map of the major milestones in Florida’s B.E.S.T. Standards for grades 1 through 5. Use it as a reassurance tool (“yes, that’s exactly what she should be working on”) and an early-warning tool (“he’s two grades past this and still stuck — time for a conversation”).

• Grade 1 — Building number sense. Children recall addition facts with sums to 10 and the related subtraction facts with automaticity (quickly, without counting on fingers every time). They count forward and backward within 120 and begin skip-counting by 2s and 5s. This is the foundation year: fluency here makes everything after it easier.
• Grade 2 — Extending the facts and meeting money. Addition and subtraction facts now extend to sums within 20, again with automaticity. Children solve one- and two-step real-world problems involving money — dollars within $100 and coins within 100¢ — using the $ and ¢ symbols. Word problems become central, so reading and math start to intertwine.
• Grade 3 — The multiplication and fraction turning point. Arguably the most pivotal elementary year. Children multiply whole numbers from 0 to 12 and divide using related facts, and they begin working with fractions — representing unit fractions like 1/2 or 1/4 as one part of a whole split into equal pieces. They also start finding the unknown in an equation (e.g., ___ × 7 = 42). If a child is going to develop math anxiety, third grade is a common flashpoint, because the concepts get abstract fast.
• Grade 4 — Multi-digit fluency and equivalent fractions. Children multiply larger whole numbers (up to three digits by up to two digits) and generate and identify equivalent fractions, describing how the numerator and denominator relate. They write equations to solve real-world multiplication and division problems. The workload and abstraction both climb.
• Grade 5 — Bringing it together. Children multiply multi-digit numbers using a standard algorithm with fluency, add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators (including mixed numbers), and solve multi-step, real-world problems combining all four operations. Fifth grade is where the pieces from earlier years have to work together — which is exactly why gaps from grades 1–3 tend to surface here as frustration.

A pattern worth noting: the hardest conceptual leaps cluster in grades 3 and 4 (multiplication, then fractions). If your child sails through grades 1 and 2 and then hits a wall, it is almost never because they’ve suddenly “stopped being a math person.” It’s because the material genuinely got harder — and it’s the perfect moment for extra support and encouragement, not resignation.

The bottom line

The science is genuinely encouraging. Your child’s math ability is not fixed. The gender gap in ability is essentially a myth — but the confidence gap is real, it starts young, and the adults around a child play an outsized role in creating it or preventing it. What you say about math, how you help (and how you don’t), whether you make math a normal part of daily life, and how you talk about your daughter’s or son’s ability — these are not small things. They may be the biggest lever you have.

You don’t have to love math. You just have to refuse to pass on the fear — and to keep telling your child, in words and actions, that math is something they can grow into. Because the research is clear: they can.

Sources include research from the University of Chicago, Stanford University’s DREME center, Loughborough University, Barnard College, and peer-reviewed studies published in Frontiers in Education, IZA, and related journals, along with the Florida B.E.S.T. Mathematics Standards.