Sure, Kid, We Can Talk About Anything. Except Math.

When my daughter informed she would be not be homeschooling after all, one of the many little sighs of relief I exhaled was that I wouldn’t have to teach her algebra, or even addition.

As a bright kid, I was always “gifted” at math, but that didn’t mean I liked it. By the time I hit high school, I’d gotten the message that being good with numbers wasn’t cool for a girl, so I shirked it. When it came time to go to college, I chose a school that did not require any math classes.

Now my stepson is 15, and I can’t even read his math homework, let alone help him solve it.

Happily, I saved my kids from a lifetime of math cluelessness by marrying a professional nerd who teaches math and physics at a university. In our house, he is the math department.

When Lisa Belkin broached this topic over on Motherlode, commenters pointed out the gender disparity between men and women around math. Lisa’s family, like mine, is headed by a math averse mom and a math friendly dad.

I’m trying to do more math for the girls’ sake. I want my girls to grow up knowing women can do just as much math as men. But let’s be real: I can pull this off now because the oldest one is 5. She is hard at work learning to count to 100. When she starts bringing home differential equations, she is going straight to Daddy.

Two recent studies show that most American parents are a lot like me when it comes to math homework: clueless and uncomfortable. One commissioned by Intel shows that parents feel more equipped to talk about sex and drugs with their kids than math and science. Another, by Sylvan Learning, found that more than 6 out of 10 parents are not confident that they can solve their kids’ math homework in middle and high school.

Those jitters about math homework translate to kids, who start to feel nervous about the subject themselves. Math is increasingly important for higher education and professional fields, but most adults rate it as the most challenging subject taught in school.

For good reason. Less than 40% of eight and fourth graders are “proficient” or better at grade-level math skills. Clearly our kids could use some help with their math homework.

Do you help your kids with their homework? Does the thought of having to go through high school algebra again give you the shivers? If we can’t help our kids learn math, who can?

Photo: tracy_the_astonishing

Expert: Instead of Timeouts, Just Say ‘Yes’

Alfie Kohn thinks you shouldn’t punish your kids. He also thinks you shouldn’t reward them. By doing so, you’re teaching them that you love them only when they behave and demonstrate new skills. So, no timeouts and, also, no gold stars.

But kids, right? They can’t be trusted to raise themselves. So why is this Kohn guy trying to get parents to be so permissive, to let them run around wild and turn into narcississtic, rule-ignoring embarrassments who won’t show up to work on time … if at all?

Kohn, responding to the criticism of his New York Times piece in which he said kids interpret timeouts as conditional love, explains in the Times blog Motherlode what parents can do to teach their kids the ways of the world without using timeouts or praise. Continue reading »

This Mom Gets It: Her Kid Isn’t the One Who Needs Help

Jody Becker, a writer and mother of two children, is one of the lucky ones. Because they can afford to live where they do, in a wealthy area of Orange County, Calif., her kids get to attend a top-notch public school, basically for free. Sure, even the so-called “blue ribbon” schools have been hit with cutbacks and, yes, even these schools rely on an outside revenue stream to educate the kids.

Because she doesn’t want her kid to be a free-rider, she’ll write the check. But that’s it. She says she won’t be volunteering as class mom.

However! Continue reading »

Bonding With Baby, Perhaps a Little Too Soon

Finding out the sex of your baby — as Jeanne recently pointed out in this post — can be a dicey proposition, for many reasons. But one key one? The sense of attachment we sometimes develop to our kids, even when they’re still in utero.

A reader to the New York Times Motherlode blog, Amanda Goehring, wrote a thoughtful letter to blogger Lisa Belkin about the bond she formed with her unborn daughter. Or rather, the daughter she thought she was having. Times blogger Belkin shared Goehring’s response in its entirety, in which she talks about her despair once she realized — courtesy of an ultrasound a few weeks before her due date — that the little girl named Lucille she believed to be growing inside her was actually a boy.

Continue reading »

Dads: The New Moms

Move over, women, there’s a new mom in town. He may go by the name “Dad,” but really? He’s Mommy.

Men parents have been encroaching on mom’s turf for some time now, but this year it seems to have reached a critical mass.

Let’s start with the research. Dad gains weight and experiences mood swings during pregnancy just like his pregnant wife — the original mom. Studies also show that Dad doesn’t value  himself as a parent, which is such a self-deprecating and motherly thing to do. Continue reading »