Maths anxiety is not restricted to children. Ask parents!

Shirley Conran, the bestselling author, made herself financially literate once she realised that £2million of the money she’d made from her Eighties bonkbuster, Lace, had disappeared. Since then, she’s made it one of her missions to ensure no children – especially girls – are maths averse.

Yet academics from Cambridge revealed this week that 10 per cent of 8- to 13-year-olds suffer from “maths anxiety”, fuelling what could be a national maths crisis, with only one in five adults being functionally numerate. Previous studies found maths anxiety was on a par with the way people with phobias react to snakes or spiders.

How can we help our children? The problem is that, all too often, even those of us who did pass maths GCSE feel we don’t have the ability. The huge success of Incredibles 2 last year was not just because it was charming, but because of the collective murmur from parents at the moment when Mr Incredible is told he is doing his son’s maths homework the wrong way.

“I don’t know it that way,” wails Mr Incredible. “Why would they change math? Math is math…”

But they have changed it. I don’t know what number lines or part-partwholes or arrays or column methods are – and my kids are only in primary school. I start to display what the researchers described as classic maths “apprehension, tension or discomfort”, resulting in frantic googling.

It may be, however, that the best strategy is to leave well alone. A few years back, researchers at the University of Chicago found that children learnt less maths if parents provided help with homework.

And, of course, that leaves us free to confront those other painful, if not yet formally diagnosed, phobias – the continual displacement activity of spending money elsewhere (commonly known as pension anxiety), or the sweaty palms and ignoring of the brown envelope until the morning of January 31 (self-assessment tax return anxiety).