Are Math Skills Inherited? Math-Capable Parents Produce Children Who Also Excel At Math

A new study found that parents who have good skills in math yield offspring who also excel at the subject. This happens due to the parental influence on a child's behavior or psychology.

The study, which was conducted by a research team from the University of Pittsburgh, found that math-capable moms and dads "knowingly or unknowingly" pass down their numbers skills to their child, Phys.org reported. Other studies already focused on the intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities between parent and child, but this is the first time that a research explored parental influences in specific academic subjects like mathematics.

Researchers of the new study found that early school-aged children have performed well on the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement, a standardized mathematic test of baseline math ability. The study involved 54 children aged between five and eight, and 51 parents aged between 30 and 59.

Their parents' math skills and abilities, meanwhile, were measured via a math fluency subtest. There were major parallels in parent-child performance when it comes to number-fact recall, word problem analysis, and mathematical computations.

Children's intuitive sense of numbers is also predicted by their parents' intuitive sense of numbers. An intuitive number sense is the ability to identify, for instance, that a box with 15 balls in it are more than a separate box with 10 balls even without counting them first. Researchers believe that this intuitive sense of numbers begins in infancy.

Melissa E. Libertus, the study's lead author and a research scientist in the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center, said the link between a parent and child's math skills could be a mixture of hereditary and environmental transmission. Libertus said more studies should be done to examine the results further.

A separate study found that preschoolers are more likely to succeed in math when they enter kindergarten if they have a clear understanding of words associated with numbers and the quantities those words represent, according to the University of Missouri's Department of Psychological Sciences and Interdisciplinary Neuroscience. For example, 'two' means a pair such as ears or feet.

Preschool children with a clear grasp that addition means more and subtraction means less also tend to perform better at math when they hit kindergarten. Possessing these abilities can narrow down the math skills kids need to learn in kindergarten and set them up successfully in harder math lessons later on in their education.