I note that you specialized in maths. My middle child, is very like me when it comes to maths: and blanks if you try to do mental maths with her. If you write numbers down she can work them out but if you ask the same numbers mentally, she blanks and forgets something as simple as the number 20.
My husband thinks she would do better at school (I never achieved anything in maths myself, in spite of going to a private school and then a comprehensive!)
She is 6.5 years old, there must be a technique that can help her trigger an understanding of how numbers work. That can open things up for her.

To me the first point here is to determine whether someone believes that there are some circumstances in which child cruelty is justified. Put baldly, like that, hardly anyone would say that they do not support child cruelty in any circumstances; but when point out to the same people that many children do not enjoy school, they say that they should still be made to go, and that it will do them good. They tend to stick with this view, even when a child starts to display severe symptoms of distress and even illness.

If you take the opposite view, and consider that there is nothing so important that it justifies being cruel to a child, then you are forced to take a different view of education. In no subject is this more true than in mathematics. In my career as a teacher, I met innumerable people who were deeply traumatised by their maths lessons at school, to such an extent that they still could not do simple addition and subtraction sums, even as adults.

The same thing happened to me with my French lessons. I got off on the wrong foot with the subject, and even though I was made to study it for a total of seven years, I hardly learnt a single word of the language. When I was at school, the first thing that I did when I woke up in the morning was work out whether or not we had a French lesson that day, and if we did, a heavy cloud of despair would fall upon me straight away; I used to dread French lessons, and every single one of them was a torment. At the end of it all I failed my French exam, was made to re-sit it, and failed it again. To me this was child cruelty, and it was not justified. When I moved to France years later, I literally could not speak a single word of French. I have learnt it to a certain extent since, but I do not believe that one can ever fully shake off the effects of really bad experiences at school.

So, I come down firmly on the side of not making your daughter do any maths until she seems to be enjoying it, and the numbers make sense to her.

Another point is that a six-and-a-half-year-old does not have any need to know much maths – her day to day life will not involve her in having to make many complex calculations. This is a very significant point; it is true that some children do seem to have the ability to study maths as a purely theoretical subject, and that they can learn to perform calculations that have no bearing on their own lives – adding and subtracting fractions and decimals, working out percentages, and areas etc – but these are the exceptions, and there is no reason to believe that it is to their advantage that they have this ability. By far the majority of children are bemused and mystified by the mathematics that they are taught at school: they often go ‘blank’ when things are presented to them in terms of numbers. For example if you ask a young child what is two plus two, they may stare back at you with a look of panic in their eyes; but if you say to them imagine you have got two apples, and someone gives you another two apples, how many apples will you then have?, It might make more sense to them.

My advice is firstly that if you do not do maths with your daughter, then you cannot put her off the subject. Secondly, if as she grows up, you involve her in all the maths that you have to do – accounts, measuring, weighing out cooking ingredients, drawing plans, filling in tax forms, checking the bank statement, checking the figures on bills, etc. – then at least she will pick up the mathematical skills needed in modern life, and may start to develop an interest in other aspects of the subject. This is more than schools are able to achieve for the majority of their students.

GL