Have you ever heard children say “I’m rubbish at maths” or “my mum couldn’t do maths and neither can I”? And have you ever wondered why so many people say that kind of thing? Is there a magic “maths gene” that you either have or you don’t or is it something different?
Well, officially there isn’t actually a maths gene that could be passed down to your children, but some people do seem to find maths easier than others and from playing PLYT with many children over recent years, it seems to boil down to one thing – did they have a positive attitude to maths reinforced during their early years?
Both of my children “love maths” and so I started to think back to their early years. My husband and I have always stressed the fun behind maths and been positive about it. For example when my children were young we did lots of counting, from the number of carrots that we were putting into the bag at the supermarket to the number of stairs that they had to walk up to bed. We congratulated the children when they could count to 10, 20 etc. and when they were playing outside we’d get them to see if they could do 5 keepy uppys with a football or 10 skips with a skipping rope. We encouraged them to tell the time and work out how long they could watch TV before bedtime and as they got older and were trying to get faster, we’d time them and then work out how much faster they were than before and how much they had improved in percentage terms. So I guess we were showing them how important maths was to every-day activities and giving them a positive attitude towards numbers.
The big improvement in our children’s maths though came when we developed and started playing PLYT as a family, because this allowed us all to compete on an even footing, and be challenged at the same time, no matter what our maths ability. By pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone we showed the children that it was ok to get answers wrong – that’s how you learn – and also showed them the fabulous feeling of euphoria when you got a hard one right. The more we played the more we ALL improved our mental maths. This really helped build the children’s confidence with numbers and made them less afraid to go on to master much harder maths.
As parents it’s easy to say to your child “I was rubbish at maths at school too” but you can really help them just by having a great “mathitude” – even if you don’t love maths yourself. Simply encouraging them with basic maths or playing maths games (like PLYT) can really improve their confidence with numbers and their future prospects. Who knows they may go on to love maths themselves and pass their magic “maths gene” down to the next generation. 
Having a great attitude to maths can really help your children
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