Jiawen Wu and Eva M. Pomerantz sat down to untangle a paradox that has quietly shaped math education for decades: while decades of motivation theory prove that engagement drives learning, researchers have almost entirely overlooked how parents foster that engagement around math.
The team from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, publishing in Child Development Perspectives, tackled a blind spot in the field. For the past decade, researchers have meticulously documented what parents teach children about math—counting, number words, arithmetic concepts—yet nearly ignored how parents engage children around those concepts. The distinction matters profoundly. According to Wu and Pomerantz, giving children room to explore and struggle with hard problems, maintaining a steady emotional tone, and responding to effort and strategy rather than innate ability turn out to be just as foundational as the math content parents transmit.
What surprised the researchers most was the sheer extent of this oversight. "Decades of motivation theory tell us that children's engagement and motivation drive their learning, yet when it comes to how parents support math specifically, the field has focused almost entirely on what parents teach rather than how they engage children around math," they explained to the Society for Research in Child Development.
This reframing opens new pathways for parents who feel mathematically out of their depth. When a child struggles with algebra or geometry, a parent doesn't need to become a math tutor. Instead, they can become an architect of motivation. Are they keeping their own frustration in check when problems get hard? Are they letting children take the lead, ask their own questions, and try their own strategies before jumping in? When children succeed or stumble, are parents pointing to effort and approach—"you worked hard on that" or "let's try a different strategy"—rather than to fixed notions like being "smart" or "bad at math"?
The implications sharpen as children age. As math content grows more complex and many parents legitimately can no longer help with the content itself, motivational support becomes the lever that remains within reach. For teenagers especially—that critical moment when academic motivation typically dips, math gets harder, and parental content knowledge often falls short—talking about why math matters, encouraging persistence through struggle, and respecting growing independence become particularly powerful tools.
Teachers can wield these same levers in classrooms, helping students see struggle as productive rather than shameful. Educators can also help parents understand that giving children space to stumble is itself a form of math support, not negligence.
The research calls for a fundamental reorientation. Rather than treating motivational practices as supplementary—nice to have, but secondary—the field needs to place cognitive and motivational parenting on equal footing and examine how they work together. Wu and Pomerantz hope this integrated framework will move the field toward "a more holistic and developmentally sensitive understanding of how parenting shapes children's math learning across the school years." Math achievement, it turns out, isn't built on content alone. It's built on the belief that struggle is worthwhile, effort matters, and learning is something you can grow into.