Should I stop her counting on her fingers?

9 August 2026 · by Larry

My daughter was doing seven plus five at the table, and her hand went under the table.

Not on the table where I could see it. Under it. She has worked out that I do not like the fingers, and rather than stop using them she has learned to hide them from me.

That is the bit that bothered me. Not the counting — the hiding. I had somehow turned a thing she does to think into a thing she does in secret.

Why I wanted her to stop

Honestly, because it looked slow. Everyone else's child seems to just know that seven and five make twelve, and mine was going along her knuckles one at a time. I had a picture in my head of her in P3 still doing that, and it made me anxious in a way I could not really justify.

So before saying anything else to her about it, I went and read a bit.

What the fingers are actually doing

Fingers are not a crutch that replaces the thinking. They are where a child keeps the number while they do something else with it. Seven plus five means holding on to seven while you count five more. That is two jobs at once, and a six-year-old only has room for one. The hand takes the first job so the head can do the second.

Take the hand away before the head is ready and you do not get a faster child. You get a child who loses the seven halfway through and guesses.

I have watched exactly that happen at my own table and misread it as her not concentrating.

The thing I had wrong

I thought the goal was to stop using fingers. It is not. The goal is to stop needing them, which is a different thing and happens on its own once the facts are actually known.

Nobody remembers being told to stop. It just stops being worth the trouble — the answer arrives before the hand does, so the hand stays where it is. It faded out for my elder one without me noticing when it happened, which tells you how much my intervention was needed.

What did seem to help

Not banning anything. Making the counting shorter.

A child counting five ones is doing five separate operations. A child who knows that five is four and one, or that eight and two make ten, is doing one. So the useful work is not "put your hands down" — it is knowing the small combinations well enough that the counting has less to do.

The one that changed the most here was pairs that make ten. Once she knew those without thinking, seven plus five stopped being a count at all: seven needs three to reach ten, five has three in it, and there are two left over. Twelve. Her hand still moves sometimes when she does it. It is not counting any more, it is just what her hand does.

The other thing that helped was seeing numbers in a shape rather than a line. Four dots arranged like a dice face is four at a glance. Four dots in a row gets counted. It is a small difference and it does a lot of work, which is why the cards in Little Lab are laid out in dice patterns rather than in rows. That was one of the few things I got right first time when I finally built something for my younger one.

The part I keep having to remind myself

Speed is not understanding. A child who answers instantly because they have memorised it, and a child who works it out on their fingers, do not know the same amount — and it is not always the fast one who knows more. When my daughter counts, I can see what she is doing and where it goes wrong. When she guesses fast to please me, I can see nothing at all.

I would rather have the version I can see.

I have written before about how more practice questions were not what my child needed, and this is the same thing wearing a different hat. The problem was never the volume of work. It was that I was measuring the wrong thing — and in this case, measuring it hard enough that she started hiding her hand from me.

What I do now

I do not mention the fingers. Not to correct, not to praise. They are hers.
When she gets stuck, I ask what she is holding in her head rather than giving her the answer.
We do the pairs that make ten, in small amounts, often. That is the thing that actually shortens the counting.
If she gets it right slowly, that counts as right.

She still counts. Above the table again, mostly.

— Larry

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