This week I have been struck by a particular kind of honesty in what Riley and Owen have been picking up online. Not the big dramatic moments, but the quieter, more uncomfortable ones. The parent who suddenly realises they are the problem. The teacher who thought a child had cracked it, only to find a blank stare two weeks later. These are the voices worth sitting with.
When the tables just will not stick
The most common thing I heard this week was not anger or despair. It was bewilderment. One mum wrote, "She has a great tutor but it just won't stick. When she is asked '3 times what equals 15' she doesn't get how to answer it, even though she knows 3x5." That gap between knowing a fact one way and being unable to apply it another way trips up so many children, and it genuinely confuses parents who cannot understand why the knowledge seems to disappear the moment the question is reframed.
A teacher described something even more unsettling. "Two weeks ago we did a multiplication lesson and this student was crushing it. Whole day went smooth. She breezed through her worksheets with almost zero help. Then yesterday we revisited it and she had no clue what it was or how to do it." That teacher's bewilderment came through clearly. They were not criticising the child. They were genuinely lost.
What both these voices are describing is something researchers call retrieval fragility. The facts are learned in one context, under one set of conditions, and the brain has not yet built multiple routes to the same answer. It looks like forgetting. It feels like regression. It is actually the very normal, very frustrating middle stage of learning. The frustrating truth is that this stage needs more time, more varied practice and more gentle repetition across different question formats, not more intensity.
The parent who is over-correcting their own past
This was the voice that stopped me in my tracks this week. A parent of a Year 4 boy wrote this in an update to their original post: "I think maybe I am trying too hard on him to get him to memorise this stuff. I struggled with maths and it was attributed to my lack of memorising the times tables. I think I'm trying to over-correct and over-compensate my struggles and being way too heavy on him."
That level of self-awareness is remarkable, and I suspect it will resonate with a lot of parents reading this. Our own maths experiences were often harsh. Timed tests, public shaming, the sense that you either knew it or you did not. And so when we see our children struggle with the same thing, something in us fires up. We push harder. We drill more. We add pressure without meaning to.
Another voice this week reinforced this from a different angle. A primary school trainee teacher admitted, "I have just started training and whilst I have the relevant maths qualifications, I honestly cannot remember a lot of foundation level stuff. I am particularly worried about times tables." Even the adults who are supposed to teach this material carry their own gaps and anxiety around it.
If you see yourself in that first parent, please know you are not alone and you are not a bad parent for caring so much. Stepping back is not giving up. Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is reduce the emotional temperature around maths at home, so that the learning can actually land.
When understanding is there but fluency is not
Several voices this week pointed at a very specific and painful mismatch. A parent described their child using skip-counting on fingers to get to answers: "I always rely on skip counting, sometimes with my fingers, to get to my answer which is time consuming and makes me look pathetic." That last phrase is heartbreaking. The child is doing the maths. They are getting there. But the method they are using makes them feel small.
A SENCO put the same tension plainly in a different context, noting that neurodivergent students "knew their tables but panicked" under test conditions. A primary maths lead echoed this almost word for word, saying their neurodivergent students "understand multiplication conceptually" but the format of retrieval practice let them down.
This distinction matters enormously. Conceptual understanding and automatic fluency are two different things, and they develop at different rates in different children. A child who understands that 6 groups of 7 makes 42 but cannot yet retrieve that answer instantly is not failing at maths. They are at a particular point on the road. The goal is to help them build the faster neural pathway without making the slower one feel like a source of shame. That takes patience, low-pressure repetition and a bit of creativity with how the practice is presented.
The rote trap and the search for something different
One voice this week came from a mum who is also a maths educator, and it captured something I have been hearing more and more. "My own child struggled with worksheets and flashcards. So I started building stories around each number, giving them characters and environments." She had moved away from drilling because drilling was not working, and she found something that did.
A separate parent asked plainly whether existing games offered "good enough repetition." The honest answer, based on what I am hearing, is that many of them do not. Repetition without engagement switches children off, but engagement without repetition never quite builds fluency. The sweet spot is both at once, which is harder to design than it sounds.
This is precisely the gap that XTables Champions was built to fill. The platform is designed from the ground up to be pressure-free, which means no red screens and no public rankings, with scaffolding that meets children where they are rather than where a test format demands they should be. If what you have tried so far has not stuck, it might be worth having a look. You can get in touch via the XTables Champions website and we are genuinely happy to hear what your child is finding difficult.
As our founder Gal Darrash says, "Every parent I hear from who says 'I'm probably being too hard on them' is already doing the most important thing: they're paying attention to their child, not just the results."
That feels like the right note to end on this week. The children who are forgetting, freezing and skip-counting are not failing. Neither are the parents trying to help them.