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 market, or even timing how fast he could run across the park. You just need to open your child’s eyes to see math in daily life. Repetition is key!

The games evolved as he grew older. Card games like Rat-a-Tat Cat also became math games—adding card values became natural. Soon, calculations like 14 + 11 happened effortlessly in his head.

Repetition is key! Time flying by is probably the sneakiest thing with kids. With our busy jobs, household chores, and daily demands, it’s easy to forget to spend meaningful time with your children. I have an internal KPI: if in the last three days I haven’t spent at least 30 minutes playing with my kid, there’s something seriously wrong.

Yet, the hardest part remains balancing passion and pressure. I deeply love math, coding, music, and sports, and naturally, I want to share these joys. But there’s a thin line between sharing and imposing. Children don’t always express their discomfort openly—family dynamics can be subtle and easily overlooked. Actually, this is one of the hardest things as a parent. It should be fine, but sometimes we don’t realize that sharing our passions might actually be about our own ego. Understanding this is challenging, and we all fail at some point. Still, it’s important to keep asking ourselves the question.

In fact, we stopped regularly engaging with structured math games before he started school at six, as his interests naturally shifted toward other exciting activities like building paper airplanes, painting, and drawing—things that didn’t interest him a year earlier. He’s probably above average at math, but that isn’t the point. What I genuinely cherish now is watching his curiosity spark questions about infinity. He wonders about adding infinities together and eagerly discusses different sizes of infinity with me, imagining them as creatures that can even ’eat’ each other.

Because, in the end, the real goal isn’t math itself—it’s nurturing a child’s natural eagerness to learn, explore, and wonder about the world.

Don’t force math.