My parents never helped me, but I didn’t need it, and I doubt they could have helped much with math anyhow. The one exception is that my mother typed the ridiculously long paper I did for 9th grade English. It didn’t have to be that long, that’s how I wrote it.
We did help our kids but in the sense of explaining stuff that their fairly crappy textbooks didn’t explain well. Neither of them ever had to be motivated to do homework. And my wife, being a writer, hammered the principles of good writing into them, which served them well.
It worked out okay - they have 8 post high school degrees between them.
I’ve been pretty good at following along with the teacher. I have to hold my tongue sometimes because it’s simpler IMHO to just teach them more advanced method than what they have been doing in class. They also went though a period of guessing answers for long division, where I could solve it in my head, but I figured it was just the process the teacher wants to go through. I’m not her math teacher so I’ve tried to respect her approach.
You didn’t get the memo? All children would do perfectly well if they just learned that one weird trick.
One of my friends thought he was god’s gift to parenting. Anything and everyone he did worked like a charm. Then they had their second child who was born with a chip on her shoulder. He said just getting her through high school was the most difficult thing he has ever done, and he’s a doctor so he had medical school under his belt.
My kids weren’t quite that extreme, but things which worked so easily with my daughter never phased my son.
As an English teacher in Taiwan, I’ve taught hundreds and hundreds of kids. If you were to take the best 5% of them, you would nominate me for a Nobel prize for teaching. Take the bottom 5% and you would want to shoot me.
Nowadays, most parents only have a couple of children, with no real idea where on the scale the kids fall. There are some things which good parents can do, but most of the top students were born that way, and have parents smart enough to get out of their way.
That’s what we do. For us, it’s mostly when she is learning new methods and didn’t get the concept in class.
It’s actually harder to walk them through it than just do it, of course. Teaching takes patience.
I had one math teacher who didn’t want us to read ahead in the book. But I thought she was weird (and wrong) at the time. The only teacher my kids had who had any concerns about us teaching or children things was my son’s calculus teacher. And her issue was that she didn’t actually understand the material, and felt threatened. We had to tell our son, “you are right, she is wrong, but you can’t disrupt the class. This is not an error that’s going to mess up your classmates. Just keep your mouth shut.” But we encouraged him to learn math, and to understand how real proofs work, even so.
He’s currently working on a graduate degree in math.
Okay, that’s just dumb. Anyone who wants to hide the fact that insulin can help diabetics is doing the kids a real disservice.
And some parents haven’t comprehended that their kid is an independent person. Whenever we had to do something that was kind of artsy at home, one of my classmates would come in with a perfect example. The teachers would give her a decent grade but not one that matched the quality of the work: everybody knew it was her mother who did it, and that the mother would simply not let go. At the age when most of us would say “my mother keeps trying to dress me” to mean “my mother keeps trying to force me to dress in a way she likes,” Isa’s mother was still physically putting Isa’s clothing on Isa. Things in that home didn’t end up as badly as they could have, but they definitely did not end well.