Rewriting the ‘Bad at Math’ Narrative: Helping Your Child Overcome Math Anxiety

The Pervasive “Not Good at Math” Narrative

How often do we hear adults repeat the refrain of, “oh, I’m just no good at math”? While the statement is sometimes said with a shrug or laugh, often, it masks a painful belief that the individual formed about themselves in childhood or adolescence. At some point in their development, that person began equating struggling with math as an individual character flaw or personality feature.

Ask any math teacher, and they’ll tell you that one of their biggest challenges is preventing students from giving up on math entirely whenever they start to struggle. Even when a student faces challenges in other subjects calmly and with perseverance, struggling with math can make many students start to question themselves, rather than the topic they are having a hard time understanding.

The Long-Term Impact of Math Anxiety

What’s worse is that once a student starts to tell themselves that they are bad at math, even if there is evidence to the contrary, it becomes incredibly difficult to rewrite that belief. The student may even start making life decisions around this “bad at math” belief by not electing to continue studying math, or even avoiding certain college majors or career options.

The “not good at math” narrative is one that is as pernicious as it is pervasive, and in many cases, it’s simply not true. Often, an aversion to math, or math anxiety, involves negative self-talk, a fixed mindset (believing that things cannot change), an idea of math as the most complicated subject, and an unhealthy connection between academic performance and self-worth.

Introducing Cognitive Reframing for Math Anxiety

If your child is telling themselves this story, that they’re “just not good at math,” consider helping them learn to reframe their feelings around math. Reframing techniques come from cognitive behavioral therapy and entail identifying how one is viewing a situation, and then intentionally changing it. There are three steps to this:

1. Catch an unhelpful thought (“I’m just not good at math”)
2. Challenge it (Where is this thought coming from, from evidence or just from my feelings? Can I think about this differently?)
3. Change that thought pattern (“Math is hard, but I can become better at it with more practice”)

Implementing Reframing Techniques with Your Child

There is certainly a learning curve to reframing, but it’s not as steep as you might think. You can help your child start to implement these techniques by modeling it for them. For example, if they tell you that math (or any other subject) is impossible, or that they’re bad at it, help them through the three steps. Gently identify for them that that’s not a helpful thought. Then, it’s important that you challenge—or reframe—those thoughts.

Questions to Ask When Challenging Negative Math Thoughts

• Why do you think that?
• Are there other ways to look at this situation?
• What would you say to a friend if they said that?
• Is this based on how you feel, or based on facts?
• What’s the advantage of thinking this way?
• Are you thinking in all-or-nothing terms?
• Are you expecting yourself to be perfect?

As you model asking these questions in conversations with your child, you’ll subtly give them the tools they need to eventually help themselves in the same way. Their answers to the above questions will allow you to help them reframe their experience of mathematics.

Changing Thought Patterns: The Final Step in Reframing

And that’s the last step of reframing: changing. Based on their answer to your challenge question(s), you will be able to make suggestions for how they can change those thought patterns.

Addressing Perfectionism in Math

For example, if their attitude is based on perfectionism, you can help your child see that math skill doesn’t influence their worth as a person, and even small improvements are valuable. Rather than giving up, they can endure a few less-than-ideal grades as they work to improve.

Tackling Math Anxiety

If it’s anxiety around math, you can help them see that math isn’t just for geniuses or “numbers people”—it’s a skill that you can learn like any other skill. Maybe they simply need another way of conceptualizing mathematics that they aren’t getting at school. If this is the case, one-on-one tutoring is very likely to help.

Fostering a Growth Mindset in Mathematics

If their response revolves around math skill being an innate quality, something that they will never change, that’s a fixed mindset, and can lead to being stuck. Try modeling a growth mindset instead: show them that with hard work, improvement is possible in anything. Very few people go from Cs to As in one jump, but everyone can go from C+ to B- grades, and then from B- to B, and so on. You might remind them of a time when they had to work to improve at a skill and compare math to that.

Conclusion: Empowering Your Child Beyond Math

The “I’m just not good at math” story is one that is rarely true. Modeling cognitive reframing techniques for your child will equip them with tools they can use to support themselves through a wide variety of challenges, both academic and otherwise. It will also help you better understand your child, their academic successes and struggles, and how you can support them moving forward.