Maths Anxiety & Working Memory | Times Tables Games

When I looked into the studies in detail, the most striking finding wasn't the prevalence of maths anxiety itself. It was the *mechanism*. Maths anxiety doesn't just make children feel nervous. It creates a specific, measurable cognitive block on working memory.

Working memory is the brain's mental scratchpad. It's what your child uses to hold a number in their head while they work out the next step. For times tables in particular, working memory is doing a lot of heavy lifting. A child recalling that 7 x 8 = 56 isn't just retrieving a fact. They're often counting up, checking themselves, holding partial answers, and monitoring for errors, all at once.

What the 2026 findings make clear is that anxiety actively hijacks that process. The emotional stress response competes for the same cognitive resources the child needs to do the maths. So a child who knows, on a calm Tuesday morning, that 6 x 7 is 42, may genuinely blank on it under a timed test or when a teacher calls on them suddenly. That's not laziness. That's neuroscience.

This is the part I find most useful for parents to understand, because it runs counter to what a lot of us were taught growing up. The instinct, when a child struggles with times tables, is often to drill harder. Flashcards. Speed tests. Apps that count down the clock. But if a child already has any degree of maths anxiety, adding time pressure can actively shrink the working memory they have available.

What I keep seeing, both in the research and in the early conversations we're having with families, is that the anxiety and the perceived failure feed each other in a loop. A child fumbles under pressure, feels embarrassed or frustrated, and then approaches the next maths session already in a state of low-level dread. That dread consumes working memory before the first question is even asked.

As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, *"A child who's bracing for failure can't think freely. The goal has to be getting them to a place where maths feels safe enough to actually learn."*

The research backs this up. Removing time pressure, reducing public performance moments, and building fluency gradually in low-stakes environments can make a real difference, not just emotionally, but in measurable learning outcomes.

There's a meaningful difference between a child who finds maths boring and a child who is genuinely anxious about it. Here are some of the signs that stood out to me reading the latest on this:

Physical responses before or during maths, such as stomach aches, headaches, or asking to go to the toilet right when maths starts, are a real signal. So is the sudden "blank" where a child who clearly knew something yesterday can't retrieve it today. Avoidance behaviour, like taking an unusually long time to get started or making excuses not to practise, is another pattern worth paying attention to. And emotional outbursts that feel disproportionate to the difficulty of the task, crying over a simple question they've answered correctly before, often point to anxiety rather than a knowledge gap.

None of these mean your child is struggling with intelligence. They mean your child's brain is currently spending a lot of its energy managing fear instead of doing maths.

Based on what the research is pointing to, and what we're learning in our own early work with children, here's what appears to make the most difference.

1. Take the clock away. Practice without time limits, at least initially. The goal is fluency through familiarity, not speed under pressure. Speed comes naturally once the facts feel safe and automatic.

1. Keep the stakes low and the repetitions short. Five calm, successful minutes of times-tables practice does more for a maths-anxious child than twenty stressful ones. Ending on a win matters more than finishing the worksheet.

1. Separate performance from practice. Children with maths anxiety often feel that every practice session is a test. Finding ways to make practice feel exploratory rather than evaluative, whether that's through games, patterns, or a digital environment designed to feel supportive rather than competitive, can genuinely shift how their brain engages.

I'll be honest about where we are as a company. We're young, founder-led, and still in the early stages of learning alongside the families and schools we work with. But the 2026 research validates exactly the design thinking that went into XTables Champions from the beginning.

The software isn't built around beating a timer or competing against a leaderboard. It's built around steady, low-pressure repetition that helps children build genuine familiarity with their times tables, not just anxiety management around them. The goal is to get the facts to feel automatic, so the working memory can be freed up for actual mathematical thinking.

What we hear from parents early on is that the shift in their child's attitude is often the first thing they notice, before the test scores, before the teacher comments. The child just stops dreading it. That shift is what the research is now describing in precise neurological terms, and it matters.

If you're a parent reading this and recognising your child in these descriptions, please don't wait until the next school report to take it seriously. Maths anxiety is real, it's measurable, and it responds well to the right kind of support.

We'd love to hear from you. Whether you want to understand more about how XTables Champions approaches times-tables practice for anxious learners, or you just want to talk through what you're seeing at home, reach out to us at xtableschampions.com. You know your child best. We're here to help you find an approach that works for them.