My Child Is Struggling With Maths: What Can I Do?

Your child cries over their maths homework, forgets their times tables from one week to the next, or keeps saying they’re “rubbish” at sums. As a parent, it hurts to see, and it raises a real question: 😟 is this a passing difficulty or a deeper problem that deserves to be taken seriously? Before you panic or play it down, it helps to know that maths difficulties affect a fair number of primary-school children, and that they almost always have an identifiable cause. The good news is that, with the right markers and the right support, the vast majority of children who struggle make real progress. This guide gives you a complete method to understand, spot, act, and know when to ask a professional for help. No needless jargon, no guilt-tripping: just concrete tools you can use tonight.

⚖️ A one-off wobble or a real difficulty? The distinction that matters

Not all maths difficulties are the same, and that’s probably the first thing to understand. A child who struggles for three weeks with written subtraction doesn’t necessarily have a disorder: they might simply need more time, a bit more hands-on practice, or a different explanation. On the other hand, a child who, since their very first year of school, doesn’t memorise numbers, mixes up 6 and 9, can’t count on their fingers at age 8, and gets stuck on the simplest problems probably has a profile that deserves a professional eye.

To tell the difference, ask yourself three simple questions. First question: how long has this been going on? A difficulty that settles in over several terms, or even several years, is no longer a passing one. Second question: how intense is the block? A child who makes mistakes regularly is nothing out of the ordinary. A child who is completely stuck, unable to set out a calculation even after it’s explained, is different. Third question: does it affect other learning too? A difficulty limited to maths, while everything else is fine, points more toward a specific block (anxiety, dyscalculia). A difficulty spread across several subjects suggests instead an attention disorder or something broader.

This grid is no diagnosis, but it helps you decide whether you can wait, support at home, or instead make an appointment with a professional.

🚨 5 signs that maths difficulties are serious

Here are the five signals that should put you on alert. None on its own means there’s a disorder. But when several show up at the same time, and they last over time, it becomes worth getting advice.

1. Active refusal and strong emotion. Your child refuses to get out their maths book, cries, has meltdowns, says they hate numbers or that they’re “stupid”. This out-of-proportion emotional reaction often points to settled-in maths anxiety or a deep sense of failure.
2. Ongoing confusion of digits. Well past their first year of school, your child still regularly mixes up 6 and 9, or 12 and 21, or can’t read two-digit numbers in the right order. This is one of the classic markers of dyscalculia.
3. No mental arithmetic at age 8. At 7 or 8, your child still counts on their fingers to work out 4 + 3, memorises no simple addition, and rediscovers each calculation as if seeing it for the first time. Arithmetic memory just isn’t building up.
4. Total block in front of a simple problem. Faced with a word problem like “Marie has 5 sweets, she eats 2, how many are left?”, your child doesn’t know where to start, can’t pick out the useful information, and makes no link between the text and the calculation to set out.
5. Drawn-out stagnation or regression. Despite support, repeated explanations and plenty of goodwill, your child isn’t making progress. Worse: from one week to the next, they forget what they seemed to have understood. It’s this profile that calls for a professional assessment.

If you tick 3 signs or more, and they’ve been there for several months, don’t wait for the end of the school year. Talk it over with the teacher and consider a first appointment with a speech and language therapist or an educational psychologist to clarify what’s going on.

🔍 The possible causes of a maths difficulty

A maths difficulty almost always has a cause, and there are several. Very often, they combine. Here are the five main families that professionals come across most frequently in primary-aged children and the start of secondary school.

🌀 Attention difficulties / ADHD

Attention deficit disorder, with or without hyperactivity, hugely disrupts maths learning. Why? Because maths calls for sustained, step-by-step concentration, without letting a single piece of information slip. A child with ADHD skims a problem, forgets a number, gets a sign wrong, loses track of their carrying. Their mistakes aren’t down to poor understanding but to a lapse in attention. If your child is also a daydreamer in class, often forgets their things, and struggles to finish a task on their own, that’s a lead to explore with an educational psychologist or a child psychiatrist.

🔢 Dyscalculia (the “dys” of numbers)

Dyscalculia is a specific, neurodevelopmental learning disorder that affects the number sense and the handling of quantities. A child with dyscalculia finds it hard to picture quantity in their mind (“7” stays an abstract symbol for them), to compare two numbers, to memorise tables, to understand the value of digits within a number. Like dyslexia for reading, dyscalculia isn’t linked to intelligence: these children can be brilliant elsewhere. The diagnosis comes after an assessment by a speech and language therapist and/or an educational psychologist. When support is put in place early, it gives excellent results.

😰 Maths anxiety / psychological block

Some children understand maths when they’re alone with you at home, but fall apart the moment they’re in class or in a test. This is what’s called maths anxiety. It can be born of an event (being humiliated in front of the class, a traumatic bad mark, a parent saying “I didn’t like maths either”), then feed itself: the child is afraid, so they freeze, so they fail, so they’re even more afraid next time. This block isn’t a cognitive disorder. It’s treated by taking the drama out of it, celebrating progress, and sometimes a short course of psychological support.

🕳️ Gaps that built up unnoticed

This is the most common cause, and the most underrated. Maths is a subject built like a staircase: if one idea isn’t solid, all the steps above it wobble. A child who never quite grasped place value early on will struggle with multiplication a year later, then division, then fractions, without anyone going back to the broken step. Often, spotting and filling the original gap unblocks everything. It calls for a fine teaching diagnosis, which a private tutor or a learning specialist can carry out in a few sessions.

📚 Teaching that doesn’t suit how they work

Not all children learn the same way. Some need to handle concrete objects for months before moving to the abstract. Others understand through the visual, the diagram, the drawing. Others again through talking it out. If the teaching your child gets at school doesn’t match how they work, they switch off without anyone being at fault. The fix: top it up at home or in extra support with a different approach, hands-on materials, maths games, visual apps, step-by-step concrete-to-abstract methods. What doesn’t come in through one door often comes in through another.

🩺 When should you seek advice?

The big question for parents: “Should I make an appointment, and with whom?”. Here’s a path in four steps, from the simplest to the most specialised. Don’t skip steps: starting with the right professional saves months.

1. The teacher, always first. Ask for a proper meeting (not a corridor chat). Put three questions: “How do you see the situation?”, “What do you recommend?”, “Should we consider an assessment?”. The teacher has a view you don’t: the one across the whole class and progress over time.
2. The speech and language therapist. The first professional to see when you suspect dyscalculia or a written-language difficulty that’s spilling into maths. They run a structured assessment of how your child handles numbers and language. Waiting lists can be long, so book early.
3. The educational psychologist. The right call when you suspect ADHD, an unspotted high potential, or a broader cognitive difficulty. A psychometric assessment (an IQ test plus attention tests) clarifies the child’s profile. Private fees can be high; public services are free but the wait can be long.
4. A public child-development centre. Many countries have public, multidisciplinary centres bringing together psychologists, speech therapists and others for free or low-cost follow-up. Worth choosing if you can’t pay private fees up front.

A little tip: if the wait is long, don’t sit on your hands. Put in place right now the at-home actions described below. Many children make significant progress even before the first appointment, simply because the setting has changed.

🏡 8 concrete actions to put in place at home

Here are eight actions you can put in place this very week, whatever the cause of the difficulty. They don’t replace professional support, but they often change the dynamic within a few weeks.

1. Set up a 5-minute mental-arithmetic ritual. Every day, at a fixed time, before the afternoon snack for example. Five minutes, no more. Always in the same time slot. Regularity builds memory far more than one big session on a Sunday evening. Mix it up: tables one day, additions another, spoken problems the next.
2. Use everyday objects to handle the maths. Vegetables, dry pasta, counters, bottle tops, dice. Set out the calculations physically before writing them down. Hands-on work builds the mental picture that children who struggle often lack. It works right up to age 9 or 10, with no shame at all.
3. Do “the problem of the day” out loud. On the way home from school, throw out a mini-problem rooted in real life: “We’re buying 3 loaves at 1.20 each, how much is that?”. No notebook, no pressure, just to train mathematical thinking in real situations. It’s exactly what’s missing at school.
4. Praise the effort, not the result. Rather than “well done, you got it right”, say “well done, you thought it through before answering”. This shift moves the pressure away from the mark and toward the process, and slowly dismantles maths anxiety.
5. Go back to the broken step. With the teacher, pin down the original idea that wasn’t mastered (place value, the meaning of operations, fractions, measurement) and work on it calmly, even if it’s something from two years back. As long as that base isn’t solid, the rest won’t hold.
6. Use visual supports. A number line on the wall, a hundred square, a marked-out line for fractions. Seeing and touching quantity is the best gift you can give a child who struggles with maths. Many blocks come from a missing mental picture.
7. Play maths board games. Yahtzee, Monopoly, card games, dice games. These games train mental arithmetic, strategy and reading tables, without the child feeling they’re doing maths. It’s one of the most powerful levers, and the most underused.
8. Limit homework time when there’s a block. If after 30 minutes your child is crying or making no progress, stop. Pushing makes the anxiety worse and brings nothing. A note to the teacher beats a scene in the evening. The rule: protect the relationship and the motivation above all.

⚠️ Common parent mistakes

When you love your child and you see them struggle, you want to do the right thing. But some reflexes, despite the best intentions, make things worse. Here are the five most common mistakes, to avoid at all costs.

• Doing it for them. Tempting, especially in the evening when you’re tired and tomorrow’s spelling test is waiting. But the child who doesn’t do it doesn’t memorise it, and on top of that they learn that they can’t manage on their own. Guide with questions instead: “What do you already know?”, “Where could you start?”.
• Catastrophising. Lines like “you’re going to fail the year”, “you’ll fall behind”, “if you don’t know your tables you’ll get nowhere” install a lasting fear of maths. And nothing is more toxic for learning than fear.
• Comparing with siblings or classmates. “Your big brother could do it at your age”, “look at Léa, she got everything right”. This comparison eats away at self-esteem without ever improving performance. Every child has their own pace, full stop.
• Saying “I wasn’t good at maths either”. You think you’re reassuring them; you’re trapping them. The child hears that they’re genetically programmed to fail, and that nothing can be done. Reframe it instead: “It’s hard for you right now, we’ll work out together how to help you”.
• Shouting or getting cross during homework. Very human, but devastating. Every homework scene is stored away by the child and lastingly linked to the subject. If you feel yourself losing patience, take a 5-minute break and come back later, or hand over to the other parent.

🏫 How school should provide support

Schools have official tools to support children who struggle. You just need to know about them to be able to ask. The exact names vary from one country to another, but most school systems offer three kinds of arrangement, from the lightest to the most structured.

A personalised support plan. Put in place for children with a recognised learning disorder (dyscalculia, dyslexia, dyspraxia). It sets out teaching adjustments: extra time in tests, simplified wording, a calculator allowed, printed handouts instead of copying from the board. This kind of plan is usually internal to the school and arranged with the school medical service and the teaching team.

A formal disability-support plan. Heavier, it’s for children officially recognised as having a disability by the relevant authority. It opens the door to bigger adjustments, adapted equipment (a computer in class, for example) and possibly a classroom support assistant.

A classroom support assistant. This is the adult who helps, in class, the children covered by a disability-support plan. The assistant is neither a teacher nor a childminder: they help the child get into the instructions, stay focused, and use the adapted equipment. The allocation is decided by the relevant authority and the number of hours may be part-time or full-time.

To ask for one or the other, make an appointment with the head teacher, who will bring together a support team. Don’t let anyone tell you “it’s not worth it” or “it’s too early”: it’s a right, not a favour. And the earlier it’s put in place, the better the child gets on.

💬 Parent stories

Sophie, mum of Léon (age 8): “For two years, I told myself he was just slow. Then his teacher mentioned dyscalculia. An assessment, two sessions a week for a year, and a support plan at school. Today Léon is a year older, he still doesn’t like maths, but he’s keeping up. The turning point was when I stopped believing it was a lack of willingness.”

Karim, dad of Jade (age 10): “Jade understood at home and froze in tests. We thought it was a disorder. In fact, it was pure anxiety. Three appointments with a specialist psychologist and a lot of taking the drama out of it at home were enough. Her average went from 7 to 13 out of 20 in two terms.”

Hélène, mum of Tom (age 7): “Tom always counted on his fingers; I thought that was normal. His teacher insisted on an assessment. No ‘dys’, just a big gap in place value going back to nursery. We went over everything again with hands-on materials for two months, and then, like magic, the mental arithmetic arrived. The lesson for me: don’t confuse being slow with having a disorder.”

📚 Useful resources to go further

Here are a few reliable resources, most of them free, to dig deeper into the subject or find support from associations.

• National learning-disorder associations: In most countries, federations bring together associations covering all the “dys” disorders. Their sites are usually very thorough, with directories of professionals by region and practical fact sheets for parents.
• Dyscalculia parent groups: Associations of parents of children with learning disorders, which also cover dyscalculia. They often offer phone helplines, parent workshops and discussion groups.
• Reference books on dyscalculia: Look for well-reviewed titles by specialists to understand the disorder in depth, with concrete tools for support.
• Number-sense apps: Apps for the visual handling of numbers, validated by speech and language therapists. Ideal for younger children who don’t yet have the number sense.
• Concrete-to-abstract maths methods: Teaching approaches well known for helping children who struggle, based on handling objects, then picturing them, then moving to the abstract. Workbooks are available in bookshops.
• Official education websites: Your country’s education ministry usually publishes institutional resources on learning disorders and the school support arrangements available.

❓ Frequently asked questions

👶 From what age can we talk about maths difficulties?

Before about age 6, we don’t talk about difficulties in the strict sense, because maths learning is still building up through the senses. From around 6 or 7, persistent gaps compared with classmates and with what the curriculum expects can start to be a worry. Before age 7, it’s better to support through play and hands-on activities, without attaching a serious label.

✋ My child counts on their fingers at age 8, is that serious?

Not necessarily. Counting on fingers is a normal stage up to age 7 or 8. It becomes a concern if, by then, your child has no simple addition in memory and rediscovers 4 + 3 every time as if it were new. It’s one of the signs to explore in an assessment, but on its own it isn’t a diagnosis.

🔬 How can I tell if my child has dyscalculia?

You can’t tell on your own, and nobody should make that diagnosis for you without an assessment. Dyscalculia is confirmed through an assessment with standardised tests run by a speech and language therapist. If several of the signs described in this article are present and last, make an appointment with a speech and language therapist, with a referral from your family doctor if your system needs one.

💰 Is paid tutoring worth it?

It depends entirely on the cause. For teaching gaps in a motivated child, yes, regular support (1 hour a week, same tutor) can unblock the situation. For an undiagnosed learning disorder or ADHD, standard tutoring is useless and can even deepen the sense of failure. Hence the importance of identifying the cause first.

❤️ My child hates maths, how can I help them love it?

Taking maths out of the school setting is the best lead. Cook together (reading measurements, fractions, calculations), play board games that call for mental arithmetic, do the shopping by asking them to compare prices per kilo. You’re showing them that maths is everywhere, useful, and even fun. Pleasure always comes before performance.

🔁 Should a child who struggles with maths repeat a year?

Repeating a year is almost never a good answer to a maths difficulty on its own. Studies show it harms more often than it helps. Only consider it if the child has big difficulties across several subjects, and always together with the teaching team. The golden rule: repeating a year with no support plan behind it is useless.

⏰ How much maths homework per evening?

In primary school, 10 to 20 minutes maximum across all year groups, and more like 30 minutes for the oldest. Beyond that, tiredness takes over and learning becomes counterproductive. A short, focused session beats a long, distracted one. If homework always takes longer than that in your home, talk to the teacher.

📞 What if the teacher doesn’t take the difficulty seriously?

Ask for a formal meeting in writing (email or home-school book), with a request for a support team including the head teacher and possibly the school medical service. If the answer is still not enough, don’t hesitate to consult a private speech and language therapist or educational psychologist in parallel, without waiting for the school’s go-ahead.

🎯 To wrap up

A maths difficulty is never set in stone, and it says even less about your child’s intelligence. It’s almost always the sign that something, somewhere in their head or their story, is asking to be looked at more closely: an old gap, a learning disorder, anxiety, a lack of attention, teaching that doesn’t speak to them. Your role as a parent isn’t to be a maths teacher. Your role is to observe, to protect their relationship with the subject, to set up simple rituals at home, and to ask the right professionals for help at the right time. The earlier it’s spotted, the more effective the support, and the more the child gets their confidence back. 💛