An early start to math confidence

"I do most of my math homework in my head," my son says as he sits at the kitchen counter doing his homework. He smiles when he says this and I can tell that he is proud of himself. He should be.

I check over his math homework and I am able to do it in my head, too. (I am slightly proud of that.) My son gets all his homework right and I praise him for checking over his work.

When I was my son's age, I already had very strong opinions about math. And none of them were good. I felt that math was hard and a nuisance and I didn't like it. I still made good grades, but I worked really hard for them. And maybe it is because of that - because I worked so hard for them - that made me think that math was harder overall.

But for my son - at least for now - math is just fine. I don't want to cause him to change his thinking, so I use a lot of parent tricks to make him believe that I think math is fine too. So far, the results have been positive. While we are only in the early stages of his math learning, I'll take what I can get.

And, if all of this helps him appreciate math classes for the long run, it will be worth it.

What class do your children not enjoy in school? Tell me in the comments.