Your health: Does a parent's math anxiety affect kids?

Does parent's math anxiety affect kids?

Do you hate math, but still try to help your child with his or her math homework? A new study indicates that may not be a good idea.

A team of researchers led by University of Chicago psychological scientists Sian Beilock and Susan Levine found that children of math-anxious parents learned less math over the school year and were more likely to be math-anxious themselves — but only when these parents provided frequent help on the child's math homework.

The new research was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Researchers assessed 438 first- and second-grade students in math achievement and math anxiety at both the beginning and end of the school year. Their parents completed questionnaires about math anxiety, and about how often they helped their children with homework.

The researchers believe the link between parents' math anxiety and children's math performance stems more from math attitudes than genetics.

“Although it is possible that there is a genetic component to math anxiety,” the researchers wrote, “the fact that parents' math anxiety negatively affected children only when they frequently helped them with math homework points to the need for interventions focused on both decreasing parents' math anxiety and scaffolding their skills in homework help.”

Lead study author Erin A. Maloney said the study suggests that parent preparation is essential to effective math homework help.

“We can't just tell parents — especially those who are anxious about math — ‘Get involved,'” Maloney explained. “We need to develop better tools to teach parents how to most effectively help their children with math.”

Is your pillow best anti-aging device?

How important is sleep?

It turns out your very life may depend on it, at least the quantity and quality, the Huffington Post reports.

Recently two large studies have examined the role of sleep duration and survival and the findings are instructive.

In the first study, researchers at the National Cancer Institute studied 239,896 U.S. men and women followed for 14 years. In that time over 44,000 subjects died. They found that short sleep duration (less than 7 hours a day) predicted higher mortality, particularly form cardiovascular causes like heart attack and stroke. The combination of short sleep, infrequent exercise, TV viewing (more than 3 hours a day), and elevated BMI (over 25) was a strong predictor of overall deaths and cancer deaths.

The second study at the NIH involved 7,690 men and women free of heart disease at the beginning of the test period. The 10-year risk of heart disease was lowest for those sleeping seven hours at night compared with those sleeping either less or more.