Why Does Progress With Kids Feel Like It’s Getting Worse Before It Gets Better?
The crumbs of cheddar Goldfish were ground into the kitchen table’s scratchy laminate by 9:17 last Tuesday, and Leo had just crossed out his third answer to 2/3 = ?/12. Two weeks earlier, he’d gotten almost all of these equivalent fraction problems right. Now he sat hunched in his hoodie with the hole at the elbow, eraser smudges all up his arm, and stared at the page like it had personally insulted him. “I don’t get this anymore,” he said, and slammed his pencil down hard enough that the eraser bounced under the fridge. “Why is it worse than before? Isn’t it supposed to get better?”
I stood there holding a half-folded load of his soccer uniforms, and I couldn’t answer him right away. I used to teach second grade, I’ve seen this cycle a hundred times, but when it’s your own kid, it’s easy to forget what you know. I’d panicked a little three days earlier when his first round of practice problems came back with more wrong than right, and texted his part-time tutor Marnie, a retired 4th grade teacher who’s seen every math struggle there is. She wrote back 10 minutes later: That’s not regression. That’s growth. They just have to break the old wrong way before the new right way sticks.
That clicked. I remembered when I was teaching writing, how halfway through first grade, kids who’d been spelling “said” correctly for a full year would suddenly start spelling it “saide.” They’d misspell words they’d nailed for months, because their brains were trying to apply the new “ai” spelling rule they’d just learned. They weren’t getting worse at spelling. They were moving from memorizing random words to actually understanding how spelling works, and that meant unlearning the old, surface-level habit before the new, deeper understanding clicked. It looks like falling back, but it’s actually stepping forward.
Leo’s situation was exactly the same. He’d learned how to add fractions with the same denominator a month earlier, and that rule was stuck in his head. Now we were asking him to multiply numerators and denominators to get equivalent fractions, and his brain was still sorting out when to use which rule. He couldn’t just add the new rule on top of the old one; he had to untangle them first, and that untangling looks like a mess. It feels like getting worse to him, because he used to get more answers right. But what he used to get right was only half the story.
That night, I tried three small things that ended up helping, none of which required any big prep or special tools. First, I changed what I asked him. Instead of saying “what did you do wrong?” which is what I default to when I’m stressed, I said “can you walk me through how you got 4? I want to see what your brain is thinking.” He talked me through it step by step, and it was immediately clear he wasn’t clueless—he was just mixing two steps he’d learned, and hadn’t sorted out when to use which yet. Just saying it out loud helped him see the mix-up too.
Second, I cut our extra practice in half. We’d been doing 10 extra problems after his regular homework to reinforce the new skill, and that was too much when his brain was already sorting through clutter. I told him for the next three days, we’d do a maximum of 5 problems, and if he felt frustrated halfway through, we’d pack it up and play Codenames instead. No extra worksheets, no extra YouTube tutorials, no flashcards. Just less pressure while his brain sorted things out.
Third, I named what was happening out loud, plain and simple, instead of letting him think he was just bad at math. I said, “Right now your brain is cleaning out the old way of doing fractions to make room for the new way. It’s supposed to feel messy. It’s not that you’re getting worse at this, it’s that you’re getting better at it.” That’s way more specific than saying “it’ll be okay” or “you’re doing great.” It gives a reason for the bad feeling that doesn’t involve him failing.
I’ve started noticing this pattern everywhere, with kids of all ages. My older daughter Lila is 15, and last year she went from telling me every little detail of her friend drama to snapping at me whenever I asked how her day was. I thought we were losing our close relationship, that I’d messed up by pushing her too hard or not being there enough. It felt like things were getting worse, when they’d been good before. Now I see it’s the same cycle: she’s learning to solve her own problems instead of bringing every small fight to me to fix. It feels colder and more distant right now, but it’s actually growth. She still snaps sometimes, but when she does need help, she comes to me, and that’s what matters.
It’s been 10 days since that Tuesday night with fractions. Leo still gets about half his practice problems wrong some nights. We still have to fish erasers out from under the fridge once a week. But last night he got two wrong, sighed, crossed them out, and said “wait, I used the add rule again, let me fix that” instead of slamming his pencil and shutting down. That’s progress, even if it doesn’t look like the perfect, easy improvement I used to expect.
I don’t have any neat guarantee that it will always get better on a timeline that works for us. Next month we start adding fractions with different denominators, and I’m almost certain it will get worse again before it gets better. But I know now that when everything feels like it’s falling apart, that messy, frustrating “worse” feeling is just a sign that something is changing. You don’t have to pretend it feels good in the moment. You just have to not pile on more pressure when the brain is already doing the hard work.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Does Progress With Kids Feel Like It’s Getting Worse Before It Gets Better