Introducing The Mothers and Daughters Maths Program
Early on a Monday evening, ten well-dressed women gather around a table at their local community centre gossiping about the day’s events, their children’s violin lessons and the recent change in the weather.
As they sip coffee and eat chocolate cake no one would ever guess they have come together to tackle the daunting subject of teaching their daughters maths.
"It gets to the point where they're too scared to offer to help their daughters with their homework"
After experiencing first-hand the struggles mothers face when trying to assist their daughters with maths, Perth woman Kriss Muskett decided it was time to develop a way to help these often-desperate mothers.
“This has not grown out of joys; this has grown out of a lot of people and a lot of mothers’ suffering,” Kriss says.
The Mothers and Daughters Maths Program run by Kriss and her eldest daughter Kita is about helping mothers understand the level of maths their daughters are learning at primary school and how best to help when their girls become discouraged because they don’t understand.
Women who themselves became discouraged when taught maths are often lost when then having to teach their daughters.
“It gets to the point where they’re too scared to offer to help their daughters with their homework,” Kriss said.
Many of the participants in the program are mothers of gifted children who heard about the initiative through the Gifted and Talented Children’s Association of Western Australia, where Kriss is the membership secretary.
"Parents of these gifted children often find it hardest to help them learn"
Parents of these gifted children often find it hardest to help them learn, despite their proven high intelligence levels.
A mother of three girls, Kriss was left struggling for resources when Kita showed an interest in maths from an early age. She soon realised that girls were rarely offered the kind of maths support available to their male counterparts.
"The program's biggest strength is that it caters specifically to women who learn differently to men images?"
Consultant Psychologist Fiona Smith believes the program’s biggest strength is that it caters specifically to women who, as evidence shows, learn differently to men.
“You could not get this with men, you could not get a father and sons program; it wouldn’t work”, said Smith. “They don’t want to get together and talk and bond. That’s one of the things the women have enjoyed most. It provides them with a forum for discussion.”
“Part of the joy of what it is as well is that the mums are with other mums and they all feel the same so they don’t feel like “Oh my God, I’m the only one in the world who actually feels this incompetence with maths. They now realise there are twenty women in the room who also feel the same and are prepared to change it.”
Smith has a Bachelors Degree, Honours (Psychology) and a Master of Education (specialising in Gifted Education) and has identified the stresses felt by parents who cannot help their children.
“Perfectionism, simply not wanting to be wrong is very strong in women, but it can limit them. It’s not a fear of maths that stops them, it’s a fear of doing it wrong.”
The program encourages mothers to make learning maths an enjoyable experience for their daughters and to try and integrate maths learning into everyday life, to demonstrate how maths skills can be practised and to show their functionality.
One mother now makes maths homework time ‘chocolate time’ so her daughter associates learning maths with something nice. Another recounts how she bakes cupcakes with her daughters and sets challenges to reduce the recipe by a third, other ideas exchanged by the mothers include playing maths games in the car on the way to swimming lessons and of subtly introducing maths toys to their children in order to make learning fun.
The mothers are also taught to make obvious mistakes when helping with homework to allow their child to make corrections and recognise that getting something wrong is okay, they will not get in trouble and that simply trying is far better than not doing the maths at all.
“So the little ones begin to see Mummy’s being nice, everything’s okay, there’s no frowns, everything is okay,” said Kriss.
Kita, who is due to complete her double degree in Computer Sciences and Maths Sciences at Curtin University this semester, acts as the mathematical authority to teach the class, using personal experiences and examples to allow the women to relate to the more complex concepts so that they can then be explained to their daughters.
Having been told by a career counsellor that studying Calculus, Applicable Maths, Physics and Chemistry with her English Literature in Year 12 meant that she ‘was not well rounded’, she now believes when it comes to maths, females do not receive the same support males do; “they wouldn’t say that to a boy.”
Some argue that in the reality of everyday life maths and science subjects are not as important as the humanities subjects, however the women disagree.
“That’s kind of a spurious argument that you need English but don’t need number, we do need number. In fact you could probably get by without reading but you can’t get by very easily without any number,” Smith said.
“It’s money, it’s time, it’s travel, it is everything you do, you need to calculate.”
On top of the everyday need for maths, the Musketts reference some of the best-paid job opportunities as involving maths and science. By failing to develop a girl’s maths skills from the primary school level, by the time she is seeking a career she is already at a disadvantage.
Kriss even argues this could be why females on average are still receiving lower salaries than males, because in the higher paying roles that demand a degree of maths knowledge they have failed to reach their potential from an early age.
“We still want our girls of average ability to be mathematically competent so that in the workplace they perform better. We don’t want our girls, no matter what their ability level is, to be frightened of maths.”
Most encouraging for the women who attend the program is to see the success story of Kriss and Kita. As the mother and daughter pair sit before the group finishing each others sentences and sharing their own experiences and maths knowledge, one can understand why the women keep coming back.
“You need a team like this; a mother and daughter to lead it”, Smith said.
“What they’re doing is empowering mothers to actually feel good about maths and then give that back to their kids, that feeling about maths, because they model on their mums all the time.”
The program remains a one-off prototype that the Muskett women hope to develop over time. They will follow the progress of the mothers and daughters for three years after the eight-week course finishes, with Kita hoping to use the information for a paper.
“Although at this stage most of the data will be cognitive rather than qualitative, it is a lot more information than has been available previously.”
Kriss has gained encouragement for the future of the program from the feedback already received. “It’s early days. You can’t change anything overnight. These women, they’re all very motivated and they’d have to be to get there.”
Mothers and Maths is undertaken as a project by the Quality Outcomes Program, an Australian Government funded initiative managed by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.
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