How much help is too much when you sit with your child?

3 September 2026 · by Larry

You sit down next to them because they asked, or because the last twenty minutes produced one line of writing and a lot of sighing. Ten minutes later the page is filling up nicely and you notice something uncomfortable: you are the one doing it. Not deliberately. It happened one small nudge at a time.

This is the most common thing parents ask me about, and it is not really a question about maths. It is a question about where to stop.

The problem with helping is that it works

That is the honest difficulty. Helping produces an immediate, visible result. The page gets done, the child is less upset, everyone goes to bed on time. Not helping produces a struggle, a longer evening, and possibly a wrong answer.

So every night the short-term reward points one way. And because each individual nudge is small — reading the question out loud with the right emphasis, pointing at the number they missed, saying "are you sure?" only when they are wrong — nobody notices when the balance tips.

The tell is not how much you said. It is whose thinking it was.

A rough test: could they do the next one alone?

This is the only test I have found that actually works, and you can run it in about a minute.

When a question is finished, put a similar one in front of them and walk away. Not a harder one, not a trick — the same kind of question with different numbers. Then leave the room, or at least stop looking.

If they can do it, your help was teaching. If they cannot start it, your help was carrying — however good it felt at the time. That is not a criticism of you. It just means the last twenty minutes did not land, and it is better to know now than on a test paper.

Most parents do not like this test the first time they try it. I did not. But it is far kinder than the alternative, which is finding out in November.

The ladder

When they are stuck, the useful thing is to go up one rung at a time and stop at the first one that works. The mistake is jumping straight to the top rung because it is faster.

• Say nothing. Count to twenty in your head. A surprising number of stuck moments unstick themselves if nobody fills the silence. This is the hardest rung and the most valuable.
• "Read it to me." Not you reading it — them. Reading a question aloud forces them to process it properly, and a good share of word-problem trouble is a reading problem wearing a maths costume. There is more on that in word problems when the sums are fine but the story is not.
• "What do you already know?" Get them to say what the question has given them. Not what to do — just what is there.
• "What are they asking for?" Half of all wrong answers are correct answers to a different question.
• "Have you seen anything like this before?" This is the rung that builds the useful habit, because it asks them to search their own memory rather than yours.
• "Try drawing it." A bar, a picture, anything. See bar models and how to help with them.
• Do one step, out loud, and hand it back. Only when the rungs above have failed. One step. Then genuinely hand it back — put the pencil down and let the silence return.

The whole ladder is designed so that the child does the part that matters. Rungs one to five contain no maths from you at all, which is the point.

The three sentences worth having ready

You will use these more than anything else.

"Show me what you tried." This is better than "what's the answer?" because it makes their thinking visible, and because it treats an attempt as worth something even when it went nowhere.

"Talk me through it." Use this when they are right, not only when they are wrong. If you only ask for explanations after mistakes, the question becomes an accusation and they will learn to say nothing. Asking about a correct answer also tells you whether it was understood or guessed — and those look identical on paper.

"I don't know either, let's find out." Genuinely fine to say. Especially with upper-primary work, where the method has often changed since you were at school — that one is worth reading on its own. A parent who admits to being stuck and then works at it is teaching something more useful than a correct answer.

What not to say, even though it is true

"That's wrong" ends the thinking. So does a sigh, and so does taking the pencil.

The alternative that keeps things open is to point at where the trouble starts without naming it: "check this line for me". They do the finding. Being the person who spotted their own mistake is completely different, to a child, from being the person whose mistake was spotted.

The other one to watch is the "are you sure?" that only ever appears after wrong answers. Children work this out within about three days, and after that "are you sure?" simply means "no". Use it after correct answers too, or not at all.

When more help is the right answer

All of the above assumes a child who can do the work with some support. That is not always the situation, and reading the room matters more than following a method.

If they are tired, upset, or have been at it for a long time, stop. Nothing is learned past that point and you are only buying a finished page at the cost of tomorrow's willingness. It is entirely reasonable to write a note to the teacher saying how long it took and where you stopped — that information is genuinely useful to them, and far more honest than a completed worksheet that two people did.

If a whole topic is missing rather than one question, no amount of good prompting will fix it at nine at night. That is a different job for a different day, and possibly a conversation with the teacher. What to try before getting a tutor goes through the options.

And if the difficulty is confidence rather than content — the freezing, the "I'm bad at maths" — then the ladder is not the tool. Freezing on a question they know is about that, and so is what to do when they say they are bad at maths.

The bit that is really about us

Sitting through a child being stuck is uncomfortable. That is the actual obstacle, and it is worth naming, because most over-helping is a parent relieving their own discomfort rather than the child's.

The struggle is not the problem to be removed. It is the part where the learning happens. Your job is to keep it survivable — not to remove it.

Practically: sit slightly further away than feels natural. Do something with your hands. Look at your own thing for thirty seconds at a time. Being nearby and unbothered is a completely different message from leaning over the page, and children read the posture long before they hear the words.

The short version

Go up the ladder one rung at a time and stop at the first one that works — most rungs contain no maths from you at all. Ask "show me what you tried" and "talk me through it", and ask the second one after right answers too. Point at the line rather than naming the mistake. And when a question is done, hand them a similar one and walk away — if they can do it, you helped; if they cannot, you carried, and it is much better to find that out tonight.

Getting this wrong sometimes is not a problem. Every parent has finished a page at half past nine because it was that or a meltdown. It only becomes a problem when it is every night, and the way you notice is the walk-away test.