Parenting is arguably the biggest thing you can do in your life, and guess what? No manual. Everything else has a manual. I just brought home a plant, and it had instructions pasted on the side. I purchased a bookshelf, and there was an entire pamphlet of detailed instructions and pictures on how to put it together – in three different languages!
As a veteran elementary teacher, I have found that many parents are eager to help their children with their school work, but don’t always know what is best or where to begin. What I, also, know is that a parent’s involvement in a child’s education is the single most important factor in that child’s academic success.
Decades of educational research tells us that an involved parent contributes overwhelmingly to his/her child’s grades and test scores, school attendance and quality of homework, positive attitudes and behavior at school, likelihood of graduation, and desire to enroll in higher education.
I bet you’ll never guess which subject raises the greatest consternation in parents – you’re right, math! Math anxiety is rampant in the world, and yet no one comes out of the womb with a stamp on their head that says, “I am math-anxious”.
Many parents don’t feel comfortable with math, or they assume it takes special expertise to teach it. Remarks like “I never was any good at math” or “How can I help my child with math? I can’t even balance my checkbook!” are common. However, even parents who feel this way use mathematics all the time. They hand out lunch money, cut sandwiches into quarters, calculate how much paint or wall paper they need to buy, estimate how much a trip will cost, read and interpret graphs, talk about the probability of rain, and decide that it’s time to fill the gas tank. Some of them knit, piece quilts, measure wood for cutting, decide how many cups of spaghetti sauce they need to make for 6 people, and use metric tools to work on their cars. The list goes on and on.
Many adults also feel they aren’t doing things the right way, that they aren’t really using mathematics, because their approaches, even though they work, are not the methods they learned in school. There are, in fact, many ways to do mathematics, and more than one can be right. People who devise their own strategies for finding answers to mathematical questions, far from being mathematically incompetent, are often excellent independent problem solvers. They are using mathematics creatively.
“You have what you need to help your child with math because:
• You have a great deal of important mathematical knowledge to share.
• Children learn best from the people who most accept and respect them.
• Learning is more lasting when it takes place in the context of familiar home experiences.
• Children must see that math is not just a subject studied in school but is used constantly in everyday family life.
• The home is an ideal place in which to learn mathematics because the problems encountered there are real, not just paragraphs in textbooks.
How can parents foster math skills and mind-sets so that their children are confident mathematicians? Make math games a family ritual!
Games offer a pleasant way for you, as parents, to get involved in your child’s mathematics education. You don’t have to be a math genius to play a game. You don’t have to worry about pushing or pressuring your child. All that you have to do is propose a game to your child and start to play.
