How to Force Your Kids to Do Math?

Summary

Well… you probably shouldn’t.This is my one rule: if my son ever says he doesn’t want to do math, we simply stop. No arguing, no bribing, no pushing. We do something else instead.Why? Because math is not a chore—it’s a way of experiencing the world. Just like tasting new food, enjoying music, or feeling amazed by nature, math should always feel like play, never like work.Kids are born explorers. They naturally want to discover new things, including math. My main goal is simply to keep that natural curiosity alive and growing.Before my son could even talk—as every parenting book suggests—I talked to him constantly. Counting stairs, naming colors, explaining everything around us. I emphasized numbers because I genuinely enjoy them. And that’s perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned: children sense your true passions and naturally want to join in.Just play. A simple wooden game with numbers and colored bars was our playground. At first, it was sorting by colors or matching bars to numbers. Attention spans started short, a few moments here and there. But gradually, these moments grew into twenty or even thirty delightful minutes.Watching him connect five bars to the numeral ‘5’ was magical—it was the spark of mathematical abstraction. Soon, we created addition games and countless imaginative scenarios. I think I enjoyed inventing these simple, playful activities just as much as he did.To keep math exciting, we built it into stories. For a while, I drew a burning house next to a 3x3 grid with missing numbers, sums waiting to be solved. Each correct answer earned him a blue pencil to draw water, putting out fires—he loved pretending to be a fireman. Without realizing it, he was doing algebra. Train rides became great opportunities for these little games, free from distractions. Math is everywhere if you look for it—calculating how much he could buy with 20 euros at the toy store, counting steps to reach a certain location, comparing which fruit is heavier at the ma...