New research provides evidence that parents’ feelings and attitudes towards mathematics significantly impact their children’s early math skills. The study, which followed hundreds of families, revealed that parents’ mathematics anxiety and positive attitudes towards the subject are associated with children’s math attainment in primary school, independent of the parents’ own math skills. The findings have been published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
Motivated by the long-standing belief that a child’s early environment plays a crucial role in their later academic success, particularly in mathematics, researchers embarked on this extensive study. Previous investigations have highlighted the home learning environment, specifically parental attitudes towards mathematics, as a key influencing factor in a child’s math development.
However, ambiguity remained regarding how these parental factors interacted with children’s learning experiences and the direct impact on their mathematical skills. This uncertainty led researchers to delve deeper, examining the roles of parental math anxiety, attitudes, and home learning experiences in shaping children’s math abilities.
“As a research team, we are interested in factors within the home that influence children’s mathematics attainment in school,” explained study author Fiona Simmons, a senior lecturer in psychology at Liverpool John Moores University. “In this specific study, we wanted to explore whether parental mathematics anxiety and attitudes predicted children’s mathematics attainment in the very first years of primary school and if it did what mechanism might underpin the association.”
The study involved 274 parent-child dyads from various socioeconomic backgrounds in Northwest England. The children, who were in their final year of preschool at the study’s onset, were followed through to their third year of primary school.
Parents completed detailed questionnaires about their attitudes towards mathematics, their own math anxiety, and their highest math qualifications. Additionally, they reported on the frequency and nature of math-related activities they engaged in with their children at home. The children’s math and reading abilities were assessed at different stages using established educational scales. To measure children’s math anxiety, a specialized scale designed for young learners was employed.
The researchers observed that both the parents’ anxiety about mathematics and their positive attitudes towards the subject were strongly associated with their children’s math skills in the first year of primary school. These associations were specific to math and did not extend to reading skills, indicating a unique influence of parental attitudes on math development.
The study also discovered that while the frequency of math-related activities at home during preschool predicted the children’s math skills in the first year of primary school, this association weakened in the second year. Moreover, contrary to what might be expected, the study found no evidence that parental math anxiety and attitudes influenced the effectiveness of these home math experiences.
Another notable finding was the impact of gender. The study revealed that maternal math anxiety had a more significant negative impact on girls’ math skills than on boys’ in the first year of primary school. This suggests that girls may be more sensitive to their mothers’ anxieties about math, which could influence their own attitudes and performance in the subject. Additionally, the study noted that while girls in the sample displayed higher levels of math anxiety compared to boys, there was no significant gender difference in math performance.
“If a parent is anxious about mathematics or has negative attitudes towards mathematics, their child is more likely to have lower mathematics attainment in the first year of primary school,” Simmons told PsyPost. “This association isn’t accounted for by parents mathematics attainment. Even when we control for parents’ level of mathematics qualification, the association remains.”
“Furthermore, it seems likely that girls are more susceptible to the influence of maternal mathematics anxiety than boys. The association between maternal mathematics anxiety and girls’ mathematics attainment was significantly stronger that the association between maternal mathematics anxiety and boys’ mathematics attainment.”
While the researchers tested potential mediators, the mechanisms linking parent’s mathematics anxiety to their child’s mathematics attainment are still a mystery.
“We aren’t sure what underpins the association between parental mathematics anxiety and attitudes and children’s early mathematics attainment,” Simmons explained. “We thought that parents who were more anxious about mathematics might provide fewer mathematics activities at home or might transmit their mathematics anxiety to their children, which in turn influenced children’s attainment.”
“However, we didn’t find evidence to support either of these hypotheses. Parents who were more anxious about mathematics or had more negative attitudes towards mathematics did not provide fewer mathematics activities at home nor did we find that the children of parents with high mathematics anxiety had children who themselves reported higher levels of mathematics anxiety.”
Despite its comprehensive nature, the study does have limitations. Most notably, the majority of the parental participants were mothers, which restricts understanding of the potential differences in influence between mothers and fathers. Looking ahead, the researchers suggest that future studies should explore the nature of home math experiences in more depth, particularly focusing on the challenge level of these activities and their impact on children’s math development.
“We need to continue to try to determine what underpins the association between parental mathematics anxiety and attitudes and children’s mathematics attainment,” Simmons said. “Although we didn’t find evidence that parents with high mathematics anxiety and negative attitudes towards mathematics provided fewer mathematics activities at home, it is possible that they provide fewer challenging activities or that the nature of the activities they provide is different. Alternatively, it might be that parental mathematics anxiety or attitudes influences children’s engagement with mathematics lessons at school. Future studies need to explore these possibilities.”
“The gender difference is interesting,” she added. “We only indexed the mathematics anxiety and attitudes of one parent in each household and the vast majority of the reporting parents were female. Consequently, we don’t know if girls mathematics attainment is more strongly associated with parents mathematics anxiety regardless of the parents gender or whether this stronger association is specific to female parents. Future studies need to index the mathematics anxiety and attitudes of all parents in the household.”
The study, “Longitudinal associations between parental mathematics anxiety and attitudes and young children’s mathematics attainment“, was authored by Fiona R. Simmons, Elena Soto-Calvo, Anne-Marie Adams, Hannah N. Francis, Hannah Patel, and Courtney Hartley.
