A Guide for Parents to Supporting Teens With Their Math Skills

As a parent, you are not alone if you feel overwhelmed when your kid requests your assistance with their math homework. Math can be intimidating to anybody, including professors, parents, graduate students, and even biologists, chemists, and physicists.

Add to it the fact that math instruction isn’t as consistent as we’d want. Math education will continue to develop as our knowledge of the brain and the learning process grows. Many people find “new math” difficult to understand because of the methods it entails. Technically, don’t be afraid to ask for help or seek out additional resources such as FamilyTutor.

Research suggests that your negative feelings about math may have less to do with your brain and more to do with the way you were taught and influenced by your peers and teachers. Developing your child’s inner math genius is a process that won’t happen overnight, so here are some strategies to assist you along the way.

Don’t Admit Defeat in Mathematics and Stay Positive

This is arguably the most important suggestion in terms of how much it will help your kid. Put that thought out of your mind and refrain from saying things like, “It’s okay if you’re bad at math, so was I.”

Students often develop an aversion to mathematics because of the idea of being a math person. Avoiding negative messages about math is one of the greatest strategies to ensure that your children do not inherit your concern about the subject.

Instead, you may address the challenge and offer to help them grasp the concept of learning math. In addition, there are plenty of online resources you can suggest to your child, to help them with their school assignments.

For instance, getting online help with math homework and assignments from experienced tutors might help both you and your child grasp the issue better. These online courses will also help them improve their in-class performance and boost their overall GPA.

Discuss Math

Discussing mathematics need not include discussing which equation best represents an event or doing a complex statistical analysis. This is particularly important for younger kids, who need to be able to relax and enjoy mathematical contemplation and realize that mathematics is present in everyday chores. Depending on your child’s age, look for opportunities to include math in whatever subject you’re discussing, and ask questions such as:

• That’s how many? If I had another, how many would that make?
• How does half of this look?
• How can I divide this fairly between us?

Let Your Kid Tutor You in Math

One of the best ways to master a subject is to teach others. Just ask any educator. Most people would agree that explaining anything to another person, especially if it’s something simple that they thought they understood completely, forces them to hone their understanding and explore alternative explanations.

If your children ask you a question that you don’t know the answer to, tell them that you’re at a loss and challenge them to learn enough about the topic so that they can give you a rough explanation. Even if they help you only a little bit, there’s a great chance they will remember that in the future.

Try the New Math

In case the term “new math” strikes fear in your heart, know that you are not alone. When did your third-grader start bringing home math problems that you can’t solve? You may rest easy knowing that new math is really just the same as old math. Multiplication, division, and fractions are still the same but there are better ways of teaching them.

Contention arises, for example, from the fact that operations like multiplication, which used to take just a few lines to go through, now need infinite equations and graphs.

Children are learning basic concepts that will allow them to conceptualize 6×3 in a manner that will extend to 60×30, 1/6×1/3, and 0.6×3,000,000. If they learn to comprehend the idea of multiplication well, they will be able to rely on any approach that aids them, even the speedy algorithms you may be more used to using.

Rather than complaining, demonstrate your approach as an alternative technique. Encourage your child to take a different approach, and try to stay positive.

Final Thoughts

When kids have trouble with mathematics, they could start to doubt their own intelligence. However, this is an issue that many people face. And as you can see, there are real avenues for support. Taking this trip with your kid will boost their self-esteem and encourage them to keep trying even if math is difficult.