Door-2-Math Blog

Having a strong math foundation is the surest way to prevent math struggle. Just how do parents go about building that strong math foundation? The rule of thumb is subtract your child’s age from 21 and that’s close to the weekly # of hours a parent ought to use on building the math foundation at home. So for a typical 7 year old 1st grader, that comes to about 14 hours per week or 3 hours per day, 5 times a week. Shokingly long? And for a 18 year old senior, that number is roughly 3 hours per week, enough to complete the homework assignment each time the class meets. Shockingly short?

If you find it counterintuitive, you’re not alone. The vast majority of families have the upside down pyramid – spending very little time if any on building the math foundation when kids are young, then panicking and insisting on long hours of study when math tumbles over when the student enters high school. By then, the amount of math material is daunting, with adolescent hormones and the breakdown of parent-child communication, plus peer pressure, you have a total math meltdown. Adding salt to injury, grades matter all of a sudden. Colleges want to know that your child had what it takes to succeed, so an F in Algebra 1 Freshman year somehow matters more than a B+ in Trigonometry in senior year.

“It’s just not fair!” one of my seniors with a 2.75 GPA complains. He is right. The system is not fair, especially since he worked so hard to raise his trig grade from an F to 91%.

3 hours of math sounds like a tall order to fill even for the most ambitious type A parent who buys in to start early. The trick is to divide and conquer: take them grocery shopping, point out the sale items and see how much you save; take them to the mailbox and add the zip codes up on the junk mail pieces; take them to the gas station and watch the gas  meter go up as you pump gas… The point is math is all around, you don’t have to use Asian drill sessions hours on end. The point is if math building is on your mind, it’ll be on your kids.