Parents know they should talk and read to their young children. Dozens of nonprofit organizations have promoted the research evidence that it will help their children do better in school.

But the focus has been on improving literacy. Are there similar things that parents can do with their children to lay the foundation for success in math, such as talking about numbers?

That’s important because Americans struggle with math, ranking toward the bottom on international assessments. Weak math skills impede a child’s progress later in life, preventing them from getting through college, a vocational program or even high school. Math skills, or the lack of them, can open or close the doors to lucrative science and technology fields.

A new wave of research over the past decade has looked at how much parents talk about numbers and shapes with their children, and whether these spontaneous and natural conversations help children learn the subject. Encouraging parents to talk about numbers could be a cheap and easy way to improve the nation’s dismal math performance.

A team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California, Irvine, teamed up to summarize the evidence from 22 studies conducted between 2010 and 2022. Their meta-analysis was published in the July 2024 issue of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

Here are four takeaways:

There’s a Link Between Parent Math Talk and Higher Math Skills

After looking at 22 studies, researchers found that the more parents talked about math with their children, the stronger their children’s math skills. In these studies, researchers typically observed parents and children interacting in a university lab, a school, a museum or at home and kept track of how often parents mentioned numbers or shapes. Ordinary sentences that included numbers counted. An example could be: “Hand me three potato chips.” Researchers also gave children a math test and found that children who scored higher tended to have parents who talked about math more during the observation period.

Read the full article about talking to kids about math by Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report.