This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet focused on education.
Parents know they should talk and read to their young children. Dozens of nonprofit organizations have promoted the research evidence that it will help their children do better in school.
But the focus has been on improving literacy. Are there similar things that parents can do with their children to lay the foundation for success in math?
That’s important because Americans struggle with math, ranking toward the bottom on international assessments. Weak math skills impede a child’s progress later in life, preventing them from getting through college, a vocational program or even high school. Math skills, or the lack of them, can open or close the doors to lucrative science and technology fields.
Mentioning numbers during everyday activities could be more beneficial than workbooks and exercises.
A new wave of research over the past decade has looked at how much parents talk about numbers and shapes with their children, and whether these spontaneous and natural conversations help children learn the subject. Encouraging parents to talk about numbers could be a cheap and easy way to improve the nation’s dismal math performance.
A team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California, Irvine, teamed up to summarize the evidence from 22 studies conducted between 2010 and 2022. Their meta-analysis was published in the July 2024 issue of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
1. There’s a link between parent math talk and higher math skills
After looking at 22 studies, researchers found that the more parents talked about math with their children, the stronger their children’s math skills. In these studies, researchers typically observed parents and children interacting in a university lab, a school, a museum or at home and kept track of how often parents mentioned numbers or shapes. Ordinary sentences that included numbers counted. An example could be: “Hand me three potato chips.” Researchers also gave children a math test and found that children who scored higher tended to have parents who talked about math more during the observation period.
The link between parents’ math talk and a child’s math skills was strongest between ages three and five.
During these preschool years, parents who talked more about numbers and shapes tended to have children with higher math achievement. Parents who didn’t talk as much about numbers and shapes tended to have children with lower math achievement.
With older children, the amount of time that parents spent talking about math was not as closely related to their math achievement. Researchers speculated that this was because once children start school, their math abilities are influenced more by the instruction they receive from their teachers.
None of these studies proves that talking to your preschooler about math causes their math skills to improve. Parents who talk more about math may also have higher incomes and more education. Stronger math skills could be the result of all the other things that wealthier and more educated parents are giving their kids – nutritious meals, a good night’s sleep, visits to museums and vacations – and not the math talk per se. So far, studies haven’t been able to disentangle math talk from everything else that parents do for their children.
“What the research is showing at this point is that talking more about math tends to be associated with better outcomes for children,” said Alex Silver, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh who led the meta-analysis. “It’s an easy way to bring math concepts into your day to day life that doesn’t require buying special equipment, or setting aside time to tutor your child and try to teach them arithmetic.”
2. Keep it natural
The strongest link between parent talk about math and a child’s math performance was detected when researchers didn’t tell parents to do a math activity. Parents who naturally brought up numbers or shapes in a normal conversation had children who scored higher on math assessments. When researchers had parents do a math exercise with children, the amount of math-related words that a parent used wasn’t as strongly associated with better math performance for their children.
Silver, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research & Development Center, recommends bringing math into something that the child is paying attention to, rather than doing flashcards or workbooks. It could be as simple as asking “How many?” Here’s an example Silver gave me: “Oh, look, you have a whole lot of cars. How many cars do you have? Let’s count them. You have one, two, three. There’s three cars there.”
When you’re doing a puzzle together, turn the shape in a different direction and talk about what it looks like. Setting the dinner table, grocery shopping and keeping track of money are opportunities to talk about numbers or shapes.
“The idea is to make it fun and playful.”
Silver said, “As you’re cooking, say, ‘We need to add two eggs. Oh wait, we’re doubling the recipe, so we need two more eggs. How many is that all together?’ ”
I asked Silver about the many early childhood math apps and exercises on the market, and whether parents should be spending time doing them with their children. Silver said they can be helpful for parents who don’t know where to start, but she said parents shouldn’t feel guilty if they’re not doing math drills with their kids. “It’s enough to just talk about it naturally, to find ways to bring up numbers and shapes in the context of what you’re already doing.”
3. Quality may matter more than quantity
In the 22 studies, more math talk was associated with higher math achievement. But researchers are unable to advise parents on exactly how much or how often to talk about math during the day. Silver said 10 utterances a day about math is probably more beneficial than just one mention a day. “Right now the evidence is that more is better, but at some point it’s so much math, you need to talk about something else now,” she said. The point of diminishing returns is unknown.
Ultimately, the quantity of math talk may not be as important as how parents talk about math, Silver said. Reading a math textbook to your child probably wouldn’t be helpful, Silver said. It’s not just about saying a bunch of math words. Still, researchers don’t know if asking questions or just talking about numbers is what makes a difference. It’s also not clear how important it is to tailor the number talk to where a child is in his math development. These are important areas of future research.
Technology may help.
The latest studies are using wearable audio recorders, enabling researchers to “listen” to hours of conversations inside homes, and analyzing these conversations with natural language processing algorithms to get a more accurate understanding of parents’ math talk. The 22 studies in this meta-analysis captured as little as three minutes and as much as almost 14 hours of parent-child interactions, and these snippets of life, often recorded in a lab setting, may not reflect how parents and children talk about math in a typical week.
4. Low-income kids appear to benefit as much from math talk as high-income kids
Perhaps the most inspiring conclusion from this meta-analysis is that the association between a parent’s math talk and a child’s math performance was as strong for a low-income child as it was for a high-income child.
“That’s a happy thing to see that this transcends other circumstances,” said Silver.
“Targeting the amount of math input that a child receives is hopefully going to be easier, and more malleable than changing broader, systemic challenges.”
While there are many questions left to answer, Silver is already putting her research into practice with her own three-year old son. She’s asked counting questions so many times that her little one has begun to tease her. Every time he sees a group of things, he pretends to be Mommy and asks, “How many? Let’s count them!”
“It’s very funny,” Silver said. “I’m like, ‘Wow, Mommy really drilled that one into you, huh?’ Buddy knows what you’re up to.”
