Helping With Maths When You Were Never Good at It Yourself

24 August 2026 · by Larry

Your child brings over a worksheet, and before you have even read the question you feel something old and unwelcome arrive with it. You were not good at this. You are still not good at this. And now a nine-year-old is looking at you expectantly.

A lot of parents quietly carry this, and it usually turns into one of two things: avoiding homework time altogether, or sitting down and trying to teach a method you half-remember from a different decade and a different country.

Neither is necessary. You can be genuinely useful here without being able to do the maths, and there is one part of it you are actually better placed to do than someone who found it easy.

The part where not being good at it helps

People who found maths easy have a specific blind spot: they cannot remember being lost. They explain the step that was obvious to them, again, slightly louder, and are puzzled when it does not land.

You remember. You remember the exact feeling of a teacher moving on while you were still on the line before, and how quickly you decided it was simpler to stop trying. That memory is genuinely useful, because it means you will notice the moment it happens to your child, and you will take it seriously instead of assuming they were not paying attention.

That is a real contribution. It is worth more than knowing how to divide fractions.

Two things worth not doing

Do not teach them your method. This is the most common way a well-meaning evening goes wrong. Primary maths here is taught through particular approaches — bar models, number bonds, specific ways of setting work out — and they are built to lead somewhere later. If you show a shortcut you were taught in 1994, your child now has two competing systems and has to work out which one the teacher wants. That is more confusing than the original problem. If you want to understand what they are actually being taught, what bar models are and how to help with them is the place to start.

Do not say "I was never good at maths either". It is said kindly, and every parent who says it means it as comfort. But a child hears something else: that this is hereditary, that it is settled, and that giving up now is reasonable and even loyal. If the topic has already come up in your house, what to do when a child says they are bad at maths covers it more fully.

Say this instead: "I found this hard too. Show me how your teacher does it." Same honesty, opposite message.

Five things you can do without knowing the method

1. Ask them to teach you. Not as a trick — genuinely. Sit down and say you do not know how to do this and you would like them to explain it. Explaining is where understanding gets tested, and a child who can walk you through it understands it. A child who cannot has just found, without any criticism from you, exactly where the gap is.
2. Ask what the question is actually asking. "In your own words, what do they want?" That needs no maths at all, and a surprising share of wrong answers are wrong because that question was never answered. Our note on word problems where the sums are fine but the story is not is about exactly this gap.
3. Find where it stopped making sense. Not whether the answer is right — where the confidence ran out. Go down the working with your finger and ask them to stop you at the first line they are unsure about. You are looking for the edge, and you do not need to understand what is on either side of it to find it.
4. Draw the situation. If there are four boxes of six pencils, draw four boxes. It looks too simple to be worth doing, and it is often the thing that unlocks it, because the child stops trying to guess an operation and starts looking at what is in front of them.
5. Check the presentation, not the maths. Is the working there, or just an answer? Are the units written? Is it legible? Marks go missing for these constantly and you do not need to follow the method to spot them — right answer but the marks still went covers what usually causes it.

Where to get the method when you actually need it

Start with their own materials rather than the internet. The textbook, the workbook, the notes in their file — those show the method the school is using, which is the only one that helps.

If you do search, search for the name of the method rather than the topic. "Bar model division" finds you what your child is being taught. "How to do division" finds you five different approaches, at least three of which will contradict their teacher.

And the teacher is a real option. A short, specific message — "she is getting lost partway through the bar model questions, is there something we should be doing at home?" — is a normal thing to send and usually gets a useful answer. It is far more effective than a parent quietly trying to reverse-engineer the syllabus at nine at night.

"I don't know" is the most useful sentence you own

Say it out loud, and then say what comes next: "I don't know. Let's find out."

Children see adults be certain all day. Watching one admit they do not know something and then go and find out is a demonstration of how learning actually works, and it is a far better lesson than anything on the worksheet. It also removes the pressure from both of you — you are no longer pretending to be the teacher, and they are no longer being tested by a parent.

The one habit worth more than any of this

Short, regular and calm beats long, occasional and tense. Ten or fifteen minutes at the same time each day, ended while it is still going well, does more than an hour on a Sunday that finishes with somebody upset.

The hard part of that is not the maths, and it never was. It is keeping the temperature down when you are tired and they are tired and the same mistake has appeared for the third time. Checking maths homework without a fight is about that half of it, which is honestly the half that decides how the year goes.

What your job actually is

Not to teach the method. The school does that.

Your job is to make it safe to be stuck — to be the person who does not sigh, does not take over the pencil, and treats not knowing as an ordinary and temporary state rather than a verdict. That is available to every parent regardless of what happened to them at school.

And it turns out to be the part that matters most.

Related: if you are weighing up handing it to somebody else, should you get a maths tutor, and what to try first — including the four questions worth asking one before you commit.

Also worth reading: how much help is too much when you sit with your child.