It is not the place of this review to outline the research that shows that working with parents and children on reading and language skills has many benefits to children and parents alike. A fact sheet on the website of Literacy BC (Literacy BC, n.d.) notes that research shows that parents’ expectations play an important role in their children’s success in school; that family literacy ties together the family and the community, sends kids to school better prepared to learn, and promotes a positive attitude to learning in the home.
It would seem a logical step to conclude that family math, by which I mean a program that works with parents and children to develop math thinking and math skills, to develop a positive attitude towards math and to encourage parents to do math activities with their children, would have similar results and benefits; there is evidence to show that this is so, which I will outline in subsequent sections of this review.
In spite of their similarities, family literacy and family numeracy have been separate entities. However, after many years of doing family literacy, some programs are incorporating numeracy or math activities into their programs, for example, the Family Literacy Centre of Edmonton, which has recently produced a 100-page manual, (Linking 1-2-3 and A-B-C, 2007), for parents, caregivers, and early education specialists, which includes sections on numeracy development, the link between language and numeracy learning, and many activities for parents and children to do together. What seems more common, however, is for math educators, or experts in the development of math thinking in early childhood, to develop family math programs separate from family literacy programs.
This separation in programming mirrors the separation of English and math instruction in the K–12 system, and in Adult Basic Education. It is a separation that doesn’t make sense—surely language learning and math learning should go hand-in-hand. It is impossible to solve math problems without using language, and it is impossible to talk or read about anything for very long without including some math concepts (count, size, shape, speed, money, spatial relationships, etc.) And, of course, the pre-school child learns both language and math naturally at the same time. It is only in our educational frameworks and institutions that they are separated.
Why do we have separate streams of family literacy and family math? It may be that many of the people who develop family literacy programs and who facilitate them, and the volunteers who help in them, have the same attitudes about math as the general population—a few love math and are interested in it, and many hate math, or don’t feel confident in their ability to use it in their own lives, let alone teach it to their own or someone else’s kids. In a culture where people with a high school or university education feel free to admit that they can’t figure out the tip in a restaurant, or that they can’t balance their household accounts, it is no wonder that family math has been left to the math experts.
A sense of exploration and lightness is often associated with learning language skills,
(“word play” and “language play”) but few such associations go with the idea of learning
math; rather math is associated with seriousness and rigidity. In Supporting Mathematical
Development in the Early Years (2006), L. Pound discusses this difference: “Language
learning is more playful than math learning (but shouldn’t be); ‘mistakes’ are accepted in
language, but not in math
” (Pound, 2006, p.17). I would offer as an example a child who
says “psketti” instead of “spaghetti” for many months before he is old enough to say “sp”
correctly. Some parents say “psketti” in sympathy, some parents are careful always to say it
correctly, and some parents try to help the child learn to say it correctly, but nearly everyone
allows it to be normal to take some time to learn this word. Certainly kids like to eat it
long before they can say it. Yet when the same child is learning to count, the pressure is on
to get it right fairly quickly, even though the process of learning to count is complex, including
the task of remembering the arbitrary names and order of the numbers, understanding
that counting involves the one-to-one correspondence of object and number name, and an
understanding that the final number named in the counting process is the number of the
whole group of objects counted.