My High Schooler Can’t Count Coins: Why It Happens and Low-Stress Ways to Help
The self-checkout screen at our neighborhood grocery store flashed “42¢ change due” last Tuesday, and Javi, my 10th grader, froze. His hand hovered over the crumpled dollar bill he’d already fed into the machine, then drifted toward the takeout tray where loose coins clatter after cash payments, like he was waiting for the system to just spit the correct amount out on its own. When I nodded at the little dish of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies we keep tucked by the card reader for exact-change trips, he blinked at it for three full seconds, then picked up a dime and turned it over in his fingers like he was examining foreign currency.
The woman behind us huffed a little and shifted her canvas bag of apples, and I leaned in quiet. “Need a hand?” He shrugged, ears pink, and stepped back. I counted out a quarter, a dime, a nickel and two pennies in about two seconds, and we grabbed our bag of tortilla chips and dish soap and walked out to the car before either of us said anything.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. Javi is 16, gets mostly A’s and B’s, builds custom gaming PCs for his friends in his free time, and can calculate a 20% tip in his head before the waiter even sets the receipt down on the table. But physical coins? They’ve never stuck. I wrote it off for years as a kid thing, assumed he’d pick it up once he started using cash more often. What I didn’t stop to notice was how rarely any of us use cash at all these days.
The wake-up call came last fall, during his 10th grade personal finance math unit. His teacher, Ms. Henderson, sent home a simulation quiz where kids had to count correct change for cash purchases, the same kind of worksheet I remember doing in second grade. Javi got 7 out of 10 wrong, even though he aced the compound interest and budget balancing sections the same week. I emailed her after school, half-embarrassed, half-worried I’d missed some big learning issue when he was little.
She wrote back within an hour saying she sees this every single semester, sometimes with seniors getting ready to graduate. Most of the time, it’s not a sign that a kid is behind, or bad at math, or lazy. It’s a practice gap. When today’s high schoolers were in kindergarten and first grade, the age kids usually learn coin values through play store centers and tactile sorting, a lot of that learning got cut short or moved to packets of coloring worksheets during remote school. On top of that, most families have shifted to cards and phone payments almost entirely. Kids grow up seeing numbers pop up on a screen after a tap, but they almost never touch actual metal coins enough to connect what they look like to what they’re worth. The size thing trips a lot of them up too, she said – it’s genuinely counterintuitive that a tiny dime is worth more than a bigger nickel, and that doesn’t click for most people without repeated handling.
I asked her straight out if this meant Javi had dyscalculia, a question I’d spiraled over after seeing a handful of TikTok videos about the condition. She said it’s worth asking for a screening if the struggle spreads to other everyday number skills: reading analog clocks, estimating costs, keeping track of spending even on a banking app, or remembering sequences of numbers. For Javi, who manages his own checking account, builds spreadsheets for his PC part budgets, and never misses a due date for his phone bill, that didn’t line up. This was just a skill he never got to practice.
She didn’t send home a workbook or a list of timed drills. She said high-pressure quizzes in crowded stores just make teens shut down from embarrassment, and the goal isn’t to turn them into a bank teller – it’s just to make coins feel familiar. We started small, with stuff we were already doing anyway.
We keep an old dill pickle jar on the kitchen counter by the front door now, instead of shoveling all loose change into the back of a cabinet to cash in once a year. Every Sunday, while we half-watch whatever reality dating show we’re following that month, we dump change out of the car cup holder and the bottom of my work bag and sort it into the jar. Javi usually sorts while he waits for his game updates to download. I taped a tiny scrap of paper to the inside of the jar lid with the values scrawled on it – quarter 25, dime 10, nickel 5, penny 1 – and I never quiz him. For the first three weeks he checked it every time he picked up a silver coin. Now he only glances at it when he’s tired after practice.
On Saturday mornings when we go to the farmers market, I give him a $5 bill to buy the honey lemonade he likes, instead of sending him Apple Cash. All the vendors know us, and there’s never a rushed line, so if he needs to count his change out slow, no one huffs. Last month he bought a $3.50 lemonade, paid with the five, and counted his change out quiet under his breath as the vendor handed it over: “One dollar gets me to four fifty, two quarters gets me to five, so $1.50 back.” He got it right, stuffed the coins in his hoodie pocket, and didn’t even mention it afterward.
When he wants to cash in his saved change for Steam gift cards, he rolls the coins himself now, instead of dumping them into the bank’s coin counter. The bank gives out free paper rolls, and he does it on his bedroom floor while he listens to gaming podcasts. Last time he rolled $18 in quarters all on his own, only yelled through the door once to ask if a quarter roll was $10 or $20.
We still have rough days. Two weeks ago, we stopped at the gas station for gummy bears after his midterm, and he paid cash for the $1.79 bag with two ones. He stared at the two dimes and penny the cashier handed him for a good five seconds before he looked over at me and said, “That’s 21 cents, right?” I nodded, and he put it in his pocket. Some days, when he’s burnt out from school or we’re in a rush, he just taps his watch to pay before I even pull cash out, and I don’t push it. If he freezes up in public, I still offer the same out I did that day at the grocery store: I can walk through it with him, or I can handle it this time, no questions asked.
He’s talking about applying for a summer job at the local soft serve stand a few blocks from our house. They take cash, and he mentioned last night he wants to do a few more practice runs with the pickle jar before he turns in his application. I didn’t make a big speech about effort or growing up. I just said that sounded like a solid plan.
I still sometimes feel that twinge of guilt, like I should have forced more play store when he was seven, like the remote school gaps are somehow my fault. But most days it just feels like one of those odd, unspoken skill gaps no one warns you about – the kind that pops up when daily life changes faster than elementary school lesson plans can keep up. We’re not in a hurry. One dime at a time is fast enough.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » My High Schooler Can’t Count Coins: Why It Happens and Low-Stress Ways to Help