I Gave My Child My Maths Anxiety. Here Is How I'm Trying to Undo That.

"I was never good at maths either."

I must have said that sentence — or something like it — fifty times before I understood what I was doing. I meant it as comfort. As solidarity. My son was struggling with a worksheet, getting frustrated, and I was trying to communicate that it was okay, that maths difficulty is not a character flaw, that his mother is a functioning adult who also found maths hard.

What I was actually communicating: maths is the kind of thing that runs in families, that some people are just built for it and some aren't, and that we are the second kind.

I read a study — at 11pm, because that's when I do my reading — about how parental maths anxiety transmits to children, and specifically about how mothers' maths anxiety correlates with daughters' (and to some extent sons') later maths performance, and the mechanism is primarily verbal: the offhand comments, the sighs over homework, the solidarity-framing that is actually catastrophizing. The research was not gentle about this.

Let me be specific about the forms my maths anxiety took, because I suspect some of them are familiar.

The solidarity statement. "I was never good at maths either." Said with warmth. Functionally, a permission slip to give up.

The public performance of struggle. At dinner, in front of the children, calculating a tip by saying "oh I'm terrible at percentages" before reaching for my phone. I can calculate percentages in my head. I do it professionally. I did the performance of incompetence because it seemed self-deprecating and charming. My son watched me do it dozens of times.

The sigh. When he brought out the maths homework, I would sometimes sigh. Not dramatically — just the small involuntary exhalation of someone who has been through this many times. He heard it. Children hear everything.

The catastrophising frame. "If you don't get maths, secondary school is going to be very hard." True, technically. Useful, never. What a child hears from that sentence is: you are on a trajectory toward failure and I can see it. That is not motivating. That is terrifying.

The guilt of realising all this was considerable. I had spent years and a significant amount of money trying to fix my son's maths relationship, and a non-trivial portion of the problem was me, sitting at the kitchen table, sighing.

Here is what I have actually changed — specifically, because advice that is only "be more positive!" is useless:

I stopped saying I was bad at maths. Even when I'm genuinely uncertain, I say "I don't remember how to do this" rather than "I'm not a maths person." The distinction matters. One is a specific gap; the other is an identity.

I narrate my maths thinking out loud when I do mental arithmetic. When I calculate at a restaurant, I say what I'm doing: "Three people, fifteen percent — okay, so I'm finding ten percent first and then adding half of that." This is slightly tedious but it communicates that maths is a process of thinking, not an innate ability you either have or don't.

I stopped performing tip-calculation helplessness. Cold turkey. I do it in my head. I show my work if the kids are watching. My husband, who is genuinely good at this, has noticed and been kind enough not to comment.

I changed how I respond to wrong answers. Instead of "no, that's wrong" — which ends the thinking — I say "how did you get that?" which invites the process. Sometimes his process is right and his arithmetic is wrong, which is a completely different problem from not understanding the concept.

I apologised to my son. Not in a dramatic, burdening way. Just: "I've sometimes said things about maths that weren't helpful. Being bad at maths isn't something that runs in our family; it's just that I had a bad experience learning it and I passed that on. I'm sorry about that." He shrugged. He's ten. But I think it registered.

The research suggests that what matters is not whether parents are mathematically skilled but how they talk about mathematical ability. Growth mindset applied specifically to maths: not "I'm bad at this," but "I haven't learned this yet." Not "some people are just maths people," but "maths is something you get better at by working at it."

I believe this intellectually. I did not believe it emotionally, because my own maths history is full of humiliation I haven't fully processed. I am trying to not let that be my son's story too.

He told me last week, unprompted, that he had figured out a problem in class that most of the other kids got wrong. He was pleased with himself in a way he hasn't been about maths before.

I did not say "see, you're a maths person after all." I said, "Tell me how you figured it out." He told me. I listened. It was a good five minutes.