Joshua Parrish is the Director of Communications & Engagement at the Collaborative for Student Success. He’s a former math teacher and the author of this guest post. 

To build a world where every child has access to high-quality learning, we need everyone from classroom educators, to district and state education leaders, to elected officials, to shape our systems. 

But far too often, we sort ourselves into rigid silos, with thinking like: Learning must be the exclusive purview of schools. Athleticism is for coaches, mental health for therapists and counselors, nutrition for pediatricians. It’s natural to defer to experts, but we shouldn’t do that at the expense of investing in the foundation of our village: families.Parents can and should shape every aspect of their children’s development, especially at the earliest ages, and they deserve to be informed and equipped to do it. 

A little over a decade ago, one of those silos came down. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a landmark recommendation that families read aloud to children, and it did something more powerful than publishing another whitepaper: it made literacy a milestone that pediatricians discussed with millions of families through routine care.

Even more powerfully, the recommendations empowered parents, rather than requiring them to become literacy or instructional experts. Most parents already sensed that reading to their children mattered; the AAP served as a trusted voice telling them it really did count. System-level policy turned a good instinct into a cultural landmark. 

Now, a group of governors is asking the AAP to take the same step for math. Recognizing both our nation’s growing concerns about math achievement and the stubborn American habit of shrugging off being “not a math person,” they’re asking America’s pediatricians to help families encourage numeracy and mathematical thinking from the start. 

The implications could be massive. Surveys consistently find that a large share of U.S. adults carry some degree of math anxiety, which leaves parents feeling pressure to support their children while genuinely unsure how. 

To those families, the honest answer is more reassuring than they’d expect: you don’t need to be a math expert, and a lot of what helps looks like play.

A growing body of research indicates that ordinary games—from Uno to Yahtzee to Monopoly to Shut the Box—can do wonders in developing a child’s early mathematical identity, building confidence through strategic thinking, number sense, and visual-spatial reasoning. The best part: these games don’t require parents to be math experts.

As a former high school math teacher, I know that the ripple effects of numeracy-enriching play are long-term and measurable. In my Algebra courses, I felt confident identifying which students had grown up playing games like Battleship, because I immediately saw their higher levels of comfort and familiarity with concepts like graphs, plotting, and axes. They had a reference point—a lived use case—before they ever met the terminology. That head start didn’t come from a worksheet. It came from a family game night at a kitchen table. 

That logic doesn’t begin at the classroom door. High-quality family guidance on early numeracy development—and accessible methods families can use to put it into practice—could be like a child’s first curricula. Too often, we imagine that learning begins at the doors of a classroom. Here’s to the governors and other leaders asking for the AAP’s support in affirming how influential a child’s early years can be for lifelong numeracy.

To learn more about the campaign and to sign a public petition to the AAP, visit WeAreAllSolvers.org/AAP.