How to help your child with Maths
when you were never good at it yourself

Most parents assume that if they cannot do the Maths, they cannot help with the Maths. So they step back and leave it to the school. That is the single most common mistake I see — and it is a mistake, because almost everything that actually moves a student's grade has nothing to do with whether you can differentiate.

I want to be direct about this, because I think a lot of parents are carrying guilt they do not need to carry.

You are not the second teacher. That is not the job, and trying to be it usually makes things worse — different methods to what is being taught now, a row at the kitchen table, and a child who ends the evening feeling worse about Maths than when they started.

But withdrawing entirely is not the answer either, and it is what most parents do. They conclude that because they cannot help with the content, they cannot help at all. That is simply not true.

"You are not the second Maths teacher. But you are the only person who can build the conditions in which the Maths gets done."

The thing that actually matters

If you do one thing this year, make it this: make sure the study routine exists. Not the Maths. The routine.

This is entirely within your control and it requires no mathematical knowledge whatsoever. It is also, in my experience of five years tutoring and a year teaching full time, more predictive of a student's June result than almost anything else.

Most parents get some of this right. Two parts are almost universally missed.

Missed part one: the phone is in the room

A student sitting at a desk with their phone face down beside them is not studying. They are waiting between interruptions.

This is not a lecture about screen time. It is a specific and narrow point about Maths in particular. Maths requires sustained concentration in a way that reading a History chapter does not. Working through a multi-step problem means holding several things in your head at once, and every interruption dumps all of it. The student then has to rebuild from the start, which is exhausting, which is why they give up and decide they are bad at Maths.

The fix is unglamorous. The phone leaves the room. Not silenced, not face down — out. For forty minutes.

This will be resisted. Hold the line anyway. It is the single highest-return intervention available to you and it costs nothing.

Missed part two: you do not know what they are meant to be doing

This one is subtler and I see it constantly.

A parent asks "have you done your study?" and gets "yeah." Both parties consider the matter closed. Neither has any idea whether anything useful happened.

You do not need to understand the work to know what the work is. You just need to know what topic they are on this week and what they were asked to do. That is a piece of information, not a mathematical skill.

And it changes the conversation entirely. "Have you done your study?" invites a one-word answer. "How did you get on with the differentiation questions?" does not. It signals that you know what is going on, which means the answer has to be real.

• →Know the topic they are working on this week. Ask once, on a Monday.
• →Know what was set — how many questions, roughly how long it should take.
• →Ask about that specifically, not about "study" in general.
• →You never need to see the answers or judge whether they are right.

Any tutor or teacher worth their fee will tell you what is being covered if you ask. It takes one message a week.

The sentence to stop saying

There is one phrase I would ask every parent to retire, and I want to be careful about how I put it, because I know it is almost always said kindly.

"I was never good at Maths either."

Said one way, it is solidarity — I found this hard too, you are not alone, keep going. That version is fine and it can genuinely help.

But said as an explanation — as in, that is why you are struggling, it runs in the family, it is just how we are — it does real and lasting damage. Because it hands the child a reason to stop trying, and it comes from the person whose opinion of them matters most.

"It gives a child permission to be bad at Maths. And that permission comes from the one person they will believe."

Students arrive in my classes already holding a story about whether Maths is for them. Very often that story was assembled from remarks like this one — usually well-meant, often said in passing, absorbed completely.

If you want to say something honest about your own experience, say the version that leaves a door open. "I found it hard at school, and I have often wished I had stuck with it" does something completely different to "I was never good at Maths either." One is a warning. The other is a wall.

What else you can do without knowing any Maths

• →Ask them to explain something to you. Not to check them — genuinely ask. Explaining a topic out loud is one of the most effective ways to find the gaps in it, and you being confused is useful rather than a problem.
• →Treat a bad test result as information rather than a verdict. "What went wrong?" is a far more useful question than "what did you get?"
• →Notice effort rather than results. Praising a good grade teaches a child that grades matter. Praising the two hours they put in on Sunday teaches them that work produces grades, which is the more useful lesson.
• →Be careful about the Higher Level conversation. Whether to stay at Higher Level is a real decision and it deserves a proper discussion — not a reaction to one bad Christmas test.
• →Protect the sleep. Studying until midnight in April is worse than useless. A tired brain cannot do Maths, and Maths is the subject that punishes tiredness most.

The honest summary

You cannot teach your child calculus, and you should not try. But you can make sure there is a quiet room with no phone in it. You can know what they are working on. You can ask a question that requires more than a one-word answer. And you can be careful never to hand them a reason to give up.

That is not a consolation prize for parents who cannot do Maths. It is genuinely the more important half of the job, and it is the half that no tutor can do for you.