Sean Moncrieff: If you run the numbers, all parents lie to their children

Nearly every day, Daughter Number Four has a new expression, most of which seem to have their own internal logic. “I’m going to kill you in the face” is a current favourite. When we woke up to snow on New Year’s Eve, she was delighted but surprised. She told us that she didn’t know we had snow in this world.

Those phrases may imply that she’s a violent alien, but given that she’s just turned five, we’re holding off on any judgments for now. We’re more pleased that she issues her threats in a syntactically correct way.

Like all parents, we’re happy to assume that she gets her burgeoning language skills from us. But this has opened the door to another worry: she may be awful at maths. If genetics defines one’s future, then she’s doomed.

I still have the occasional stress dream about Leaving Cert maths, usually along the lines that my assumption that I wouldn’t need it after the exam was wrong. I dream about a world where knowledge of differentiation is as basic as how to use a phone, where people do graphs of functions for fun. Everyone speaks a language that I do not understand.

Why are we taking our frustrations out on perfect strangers?

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My black-bean burritos show that effortless can also be delicious

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Why is no one producing Irish lentils?

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Seán Moncrieff: I’ve never taken part in an orgy

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My brain seemed to eject any mathematical knowledge I had; almost like I was allergic to it

Even the sight of wavy lines and letters encased in brackets still causes my brain to shut down. My memory of maths class consists of a damp smell, boredom, bafflement and the boy who sat beside me with military-grade halitosis. In my mock pass maths Leaving Cert I got 13 per cent. My parents arranged for a series of grinds, with the same teacher, who was as bored as I was. But it was enough for me to scrape a pass.

I can’t tell you what I learned though. I can still remember how Ox-bow lakes form, or the leaders of the 1916 Rising, or that Portrait of a Lady is quite dull. But my brain seemed to eject any mathematical knowledge I had; almost like I was allergic to it.

Happily, my stress dream has proven to be incorrect. I've never found my innumeracy to be an impediment. If I am innumerate. Herself had a similar experience to me. In National School she liked maths. There was adding, subtracting and division. It had a real-world use. It's only when she arrived in secondary school and maths was suddenly a spacey barrage of letters and shapes that she started to have a problem with it.

I’m not blaming maths for this. It’s wonderful that it can be used to make computers fast or predict the shape of the universe. I just have no idea how or why that happens; and we both worry that we might infect Daughter Number Four with our anti-maths bias.

In the parental context, lying is caring: which is contradictory and complicated

Because genetics rarely defines these things. There isn’t a Maths Gene, and even if there was, she may well have inherited a good one from some distant ancestor. Daughter Number Two already bucked this trend when she did Higher Maths for the Leaving Cert.

Thus, we’ve decided to be wildly excited and supportive of any maths she engages in. We’ll have, at best, a limited understanding of any maths she does, and eventually no understanding at all. But we’ve vowed to be excited and thrilled when she does it, especially when she gets her sums right. If they are sums.

But this strategy won’t work forever. Eventually she’ll guess that we’re spoofing. Depending on the age that this happens, she may feel a certain sense of betrayal. It may discourage her from her maths endeavours.

What we hope is that she would have reached that level of maturity to realise that yes, our enthusiasm did involve lying through our teeth. But all parents lie to their children: about the tooth fairy, about if we drank as teenagers or when we first had sex. In the parental context, lying is caring: which is contradictory and complicated. As far as I can tell, just like Algebra.