20 ms·

Parents' Math Anxiety Is Contagious to Their Kids

83 points by euske 11y ago

roel_v 11y ago
"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?
- maaku 11y ago
  Yes. Not among engineers, of course, but among the general population? Yes.
- stdbrouw 11y ago
  I wouldn't necessarily chalk it up to intelligence. I'm finishing a masters in statistics at the moment, quite a lot of math involved, and I'm mostly doing fine, however when I started the program after not having seen any mathematics in about a decade, I hardly remembered the difference between the circumference and the area of a circle. Now, calculating the amount of paint needed to paint a room might seem like more of a life skill than a math skill, but for some people it just doesn't come up, and when they do suddenly need math for something, they're not likely to trust whatever basic arithmetic they do think they still know. For some people who are weak at math, it even becomes a badge of honor: "yeah, um, sure, we could calculate how we want to split the bill, but do we really want to be such nerds about it?" Studies abound, too, showing that even grade school maths teachers often eff up when quizzed on pre-algebra.
- datr 11y ago
  I know what you're getting at but to be fair that probably is a slightly trickier question than it seems. You need to factor in how absorbent the walls are (are you using unfinished drywall?), what colour the walls currently are (Is it very different to the paint? You'll probably need multiple coats.), what's the brand of paint you're using (I've seen different brands range between 350 - 450 sqft / gallon).
  - DanBC 11y ago
    The math version of the question would say "This little can of paint can give a single coat to 5 square metres of wall. How many cans would you need to give two coats to a room that is 4 metres by 3 metres by 2.5 metres?" A number of people can't do this.
- DanBC 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
stdbrouw 11y ago
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/publication/222680508_Mathematics_in_the_home_Homework_practices_and_motherchild_interactions_doing_mathematics/links/0a85e530ca35b49b3b000000.pdf http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicole_Else-Quest/public...) 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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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.
adwf 11y ago
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.
- learnstats2 11y ago
  Probably the most effective way to learn anything is to ask someone who knows and is willing to teach you.
  - adwf 11y ago
    Those people are called teachers. Generally somewhat expert in their topic. Usually more so than the parents. If a kids approach to homework is to try everything and leave the answers he can't do for mum and dad, he'll be crippled in his learning. The point of homework isn't to get 100%, it's to learn.
    - calibraxis 11y ago
      I tutor people -- I use "tutor" to emphasize individual or small group instruction -- and the idea of mainstream teaching is horrific. I fully agree with the poster learnstats2. For one thing (and this is probably most damning), classes are highly regulated by school administrators. Managers who try to hire obedient teachers. The few teachers who try to slip through are nevertheless horrifically constrainted. Children want to learn; it's a deep human motivation that has to be beaten out of people. The adults I teach have to be scrubbed of so many educational scars and bad habits. If only I had time right now to go into depth of all the antipatterns, the symptoms.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - sethammons 11y ago
        I think I hear a blog post coming.... ;)
    - 11y ago
tempodox 11y ago
Aren't practically all of parents' anxieties contagious to their kids?
mewse 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Or what about "mathy" parents that show anxiety for the soft sciences?
  - analog31 11y ago
    Is soft science anxiety a thing?
    - grayclhn 11y ago
      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.)
- zamalek 11y ago
  > Parents' anxiety Really anything is - we've all seen it extend as far as prejudices. However, the degree of the influence probably varies wildly and I'd posit that "internal stress/stressors" (such as anxieties, fears) could have the largest overall influence.
- wvenable 11y ago
  > Or maybe even "Parents' anxiety is contagious to their kids" Definitely. As a parent, you have to be careful not to let your own fears or anxiety influence your children. I'm sure it's a good evolutionary trait -- children who afraid of the same things as their parents probably survive longer in the wild. But you don't want pass along any irrational fears.
hadeharian 11y ago
Contagious? Sure about that? Have you ruled out epigenetics?
- hga 11y ago
  No need to go that far. Lots of behavior is heritable, so if one or both parents have "math anxiety", there's a chance their children will also have it.
- jerf 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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...
pjmorris 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
leni536 11y ago
> 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 11y ago
  This is the study I believe they are referring to: http://cogdevlab.uchicago.edu/sites/cogdevlab.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/Maloney%20et%20al%20(2015)%20Intergenerational%20effects.pdf http://cogdevlab.uchicago.edu/sites/cogdevlab.uchicago.edu/f... (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.
BurningFrog 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 ...
  - randomnumber53 11y ago
    Ah, but it's only a thoughtcrime if you don't say it, and people call you an idiot for just thinking that.
  - dnissley 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
- Jarwain 11y ago
  Doesn't the study control for this? "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." The implication is that if the math-anxious parents did not work with their children as much, these children did better.
iamthepieman 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
xacaxulu 11y ago
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.
Chinjut 11y ago
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".

83 points by euske 11y ago

"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?

maaku 11y ago
Yes. Not among engineers, of course, but among the general population? Yes.
stdbrouw 11y ago
I wouldn't necessarily chalk it up to intelligence. I'm finishing a masters in statistics at the moment, quite a lot of math involved, and I'm mostly doing fine, however when I started the program after not having seen any mathematics in about a decade, I hardly remembered the difference between the circumference and the area of a circle. Now, calculating the amount of paint needed to paint a room might seem like more of a life skill than a math skill, but for some people it just doesn't come up, and when they do suddenly need math for something, they're not likely to trust whatever basic arithmetic they do think they still know. For some people who are weak at math, it even becomes a badge of honor: "yeah, um, sure, we could calculate how we want to split the bill, but do we really want to be such nerds about it?" Studies abound, too, showing that even grade school maths teachers often eff up when quizzed on pre-algebra.
datr 11y ago
I know what you're getting at but to be fair that probably is a slightly trickier question than it seems. You need to factor in how absorbent the walls are (are you using unfinished drywall?), what colour the walls currently are (Is it very different to the paint? You'll probably need multiple coats.), what's the brand of paint you're using (I've seen different brands range between 350 - 450 sqft / gallon).
- DanBC 11y ago
  The math version of the question would say "This little can of paint can give a single coat to 5 square metres of wall. How many cans would you need to give two coats to a room that is 4 metres by 3 metres by 2.5 metres?" A number of people can't do this.
DanBC 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

stdbrouw 11y ago

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/publication/222680508_Mathematics_in_the_home_Homework_practices_and_motherchild_interactions_doing_mathematics/links/0a85e530ca35b49b3b000000.pdf http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicole_Else-Quest/public...) 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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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.

adwf 11y ago

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.

learnstats2 11y ago
Probably the most effective way to learn anything is to ask someone who knows and is willing to teach you.
- adwf 11y ago
  Those people are called teachers. Generally somewhat expert in their topic. Usually more so than the parents. If a kids approach to homework is to try everything and leave the answers he can't do for mum and dad, he'll be crippled in his learning. The point of homework isn't to get 100%, it's to learn.
  - calibraxis 11y ago
    I tutor people -- I use "tutor" to emphasize individual or small group instruction -- and the idea of mainstream teaching is horrific. I fully agree with the poster learnstats2. For one thing (and this is probably most damning), classes are highly regulated by school administrators. Managers who try to hire obedient teachers. The few teachers who try to slip through are nevertheless horrifically constrainted. Children want to learn; it's a deep human motivation that has to be beaten out of people. The adults I teach have to be scrubbed of so many educational scars and bad habits. If only I had time right now to go into depth of all the antipatterns, the symptoms.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - sethammons 11y ago
      I think I hear a blog post coming.... ;)
  - 11y ago

tempodox 11y ago

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

mewse 11y ago

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 11y ago
Or what about "mathy" parents that show anxiety for the soft sciences?
- analog31 11y ago
  Is soft science anxiety a thing?
  - grayclhn 11y ago
    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.)
zamalek 11y ago
> Parents' anxiety Really anything is - we've all seen it extend as far as prejudices. However, the degree of the influence probably varies wildly and I'd posit that "internal stress/stressors" (such as anxieties, fears) could have the largest overall influence.
wvenable 11y ago
> Or maybe even "Parents' anxiety is contagious to their kids" Definitely. As a parent, you have to be careful not to let your own fears or anxiety influence your children. I'm sure it's a good evolutionary trait -- children who afraid of the same things as their parents probably survive longer in the wild. But you don't want pass along any irrational fears.

hadeharian 11y ago

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

hga 11y ago
No need to go that far. Lots of behavior is heritable, so if one or both parents have "math anxiety", there's a chance their children will also have it.
jerf 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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...

pjmorris 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

leni536 11y ago

> 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 11y ago
This is the study I believe they are referring to: http://cogdevlab.uchicago.edu/sites/cogdevlab.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/Maloney%20et%20al%20(2015)%20Intergenerational%20effects.pdf http://cogdevlab.uchicago.edu/sites/cogdevlab.uchicago.edu/f... (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.

BurningFrog 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 ...
- randomnumber53 11y ago
  Ah, but it's only a thoughtcrime if you don't say it, and people call you an idiot for just thinking that.
- dnissley 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
Jarwain 11y ago
Doesn't the study control for this? "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." The implication is that if the math-anxious parents did not work with their children as much, these children did better.

iamthepieman 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

xacaxulu 11y ago

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.

Chinjut 11y ago

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".