Math struggles are not always about effort or attention. For some kids, the challenge runs deeper, starting with how they understand numbers, patterns, and quantities. In this episode, specialist Laura Jackson unpacks dyscalculia a little-known learning ,disability that affects number sense, problem-solving, and everyday tasks like time, money, and measurement, often leaving kids frustrated and misunderstood. Dive in to learn how curiosity, validation, and informed, targeted support can reduce anxiety, build confidence, and help your child develop skills that finally make math (and life) feel more manageable.

What to expect in this episode:

• What dyscalculia is and how it differs from general math struggles
• Why more studying and practice problems don’t address the core challenge
• How dyscalculia impacts everyday life beyond school subjects
• Why traditional tutoring may not address the root of the issue
• The importance of curiosity and validation in supporting kids

The Hidden Math Disability: Understanding and Managing Dyscalculia with Laura Jackson

About Laura Jackson

Laura M. Jackson is an author, dyscalculia specialist, and founder of Discovering Dyscalculia. She coaches individuals and families through the diagnosis of dyscalculia or math learning disability, which impacts at least 1 in every 20 students and adults. Laura’s work in this little-known field began in 2017 with her own daughter’s dyscalculia diagnosis. Since then, she has written a book, led workshops and training sessions, coached parents, students, teachers, and adults, and collaborated with dyscalculia experts in the US and the UK. Through her website, writing, speaking engagements, and coaching, her mission is to raise greater dyscalculia awareness, education, and support for individuals and families impacted by dyscalculia.

Connect with Laura

• Website: Discovering Dyscalculia
• Book: The Book | Discovering Dyscalculia by Laura M Jackson 
• Podcast: Discovering Dyscalculia | The Podcast 

Related Links:

• EP226: Math Anxiety in Kids: How to Close the Learning Gap
• EP216: ADHD & Memory: It’s So Important, I Forgot
• EP233: Why Homework Is Hard: Executive Function, Stress, and Real Solutions

Connect with ImpactParents:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/impactparents
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ImpactParents
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/impactparents

Our Discussion

Laura Jackson
Like so many other parents, my journey into this work came from a personal experience that completely transformed my life and pushed me into learning about something I previously knew almost nothing about. In my case, that was dyscalculia.

When my daughter was nine years old, I discovered dyscalculia for the first time. She had been struggling in math for years, and I was doing everything parents are told to do. We tried after-school programs, worked closely with teachers, had her pulled out for support with a math specialist, all of it. But despite all that effort, something still wasn’t clicking.

Then one day I had a conversation with a friend who was dyscalculic herself and had raised two dyscalculic daughters. She casually mentioned a math learning disability, and I remember thinking, “What in the world is that?” I had never even heard the term before.

So I Googled it. I found a description on Understood.org, and even though the information was pretty limited back then compared to what’s available now, I immediately thought, “This is my daughter exactly.” It fit her to a T.

That moment launched me into a deep dive. I needed to understand: What is dyscalculia? How do we help? What’s really going on here? I started writing a blog because at the time I couldn’t find other parents openly talking about this experience or sharing practical guidance. Eventually that led to writing a book with GHF Press, and from there I began coaching and working as what I now call a dyscalculia specialist and guide.

A lot of my work now is helping parents, teachers, students, and even dyscalculic adults navigate school, work, and daily life. And honestly, a huge part of what I do is simply raising awareness, because there still aren’t university courses in the United States specifically focused on dyscalculia.

Parents often look to schools for answers, but educators usually have just as many questions as the families do because they haven’t been trained in this area either. So I started connecting with experts, especially in the UK where much of the research and support infrastructure already existed, and bringing those resources back to families here in the U.S.

I’ve also been working to connect experts across the United States and help build a larger alliance focused on dyscalculia awareness, collaboration, and resource-sharing so families feel less isolated and more supported.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Beautiful. And honestly, your story feels so familiar to so many parents in this community. I often say that motherhood is the necessity of invention. We end up creating the support we wish had existed for us when we needed it.

That’s really the foundation of ImpactParents too. Parents spending years trying to help their child, sensing that something deeper is going on, and eventually being the one who figures it out because the professionals around them simply don’t have the training or language yet.

Laura Jackson
Exactly. And it can feel incredibly lonely while you’re in it. That’s why conversations like this matter so much. Parents need to know they’re not alone. There are other families navigating these same complicated waters, asking the same questions, and trying to build support where there often isn’t enough yet.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. Yeah. So before we get into a little more detail about the tricky waters, I wanna stay with this kind of macro view of the challenge because what you said, and this happened to me when I first learned about PDA about a decade ago, it took me to the UK.

And so there are ways in which we here in the United States are ahead of what’s happening in other parts of the world, but also ways in which we’re very much behind. Yeah. And so one of the things I’ve learned in doing this work globally is that we all have different definitions for things around the globe. Yes. Yes.

And so, like, the term dyslexia means something different in the UK than it does in Australia than it does in the US. Yes. Yeah. Which is maybe a topic for another podcast. Maybe. So I’m gonna pin that one.

Laura Jackson
Pin it. But yes. Right. It’s so true, even between areas of the US or between psychologists and…

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Right. So when you look at this term dyscalculia, which is a math disability, basically a learning disability, is it the same term everywhere, or is it just that nobody knows what it is?

Laura Jackson
No, we are in a very tricky stage, just like, as you mentioned, dyslexia, because experts and researchers are still arguing as to the exact definition of it. Some countries have… So Scotland recently came up with a definition, kind of a screening list. They’ve sort of honed in on what that is for their country. But there is a lot of debate, friendly and not friendly debate, between the researchers on what it is.

So I have landed in a certain camp, but that is not the same camp that other people have. Sometimes I have a family come to me, and they have a dyscalculia diagnosis from a psychologist. To me, that doesn’t for sure tell me what the specific issues are for that student because some psychologists put all math struggles under the title of dyscalculia.

Others, which is more the camp I fall under, my favorite researcher is Brian Butterworth, Emeritus Professor at University College London. He just wrote the second edition of his book Dyscalculia: From Science to Education. He would more describe dyscalculia as a lack of number sense and an understanding of numbers as sets and groups.

So it’s really not even just math and calculating. It’s a lack of understanding quantity and amount and numbers. And I resonate with that because raising a dyscalculic daughter, I have this unique situation of watching her through everyday life, not just math class.

A lot of times teachers only see the student struggling in math class, but I see how anytime there are numbers and quantity estimation and comparison, my dyscalculic daughter struggles with that.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And quantity estimation, so that could be in word problems. That could be in an English passage for somebody to understand. That could have a lot of impact. Social studies, dates, science.

Laura Jackson
Yes. Science. A huge impact in science, social studies, amounts, dates. In high school, my daughter was taking an advanced honors social studies class, and she bombed a test, and she’s a 4.0 student.

She went in and went over the test with her teacher, who was very gracious. This doesn’t always happen. The problems that she missed were all having to do with percentages and amounts regarding the government. So what percentage of Congress blah blah blah, or how long is this river, what is the population of… Those were the questions she missed.

But on an oral exam about the content, she aced it. She just knew everything. So yeah, it impacts driving. It impacts cooking. It impacts remembering your Social Security number. Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So it’s not just remembering numbers, but there’s also this relational use of numbers.

Laura Jackson
Yes. Yes. So the comparison, Brian would word it as kind of the relationship between numbers. So the relationship between five and 50, we think of that as, okay, well, we have five tens. They do not think of it as that. They wouldn’t know how to compare even five and six, even thinking about the different ways that those compare and work together, how numbers split apart.

You can ask a student, “What is four plus two?” and they’ll count on their fingers, and they’ll tell you six because they’re counting in ones. They can do that. And then you say, “Well, okay, we have six, and then we’re gonna take away that two again.” Blank stare. Don’t know. Frozen. They can’t visualize that these are groups that can be broken apart or built on.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. So I have two different directions I wanna go, and I wanna ask you one quick question, then we’re gonna take a break and go the other direction, okay? Yep.

So the one quick question is, how does this differ from any other math learning challenge? What makes this unique versus other kids who struggle? What’s different with dyscalculia?

Laura Jackson
Totally. When I see students and we hear that they’re struggling in math or I’m working with a school and they say this percentage of our students struggle in math, I feel it’s really important to find out why they’re struggling.

So dyscalculic students, but also dyslexic students, will struggle with the language of math. I think you had someone on, I did, I will make a link to that, he was talking about all the language in math, so I won’t go into detail, but you will see a real struggle with what is borrowing? What are we talking about borrowing when we do subtraction? Or carrying over. So there’s just a lot of confusion with language.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Let me just, so that people who aren’t, who are getting distracted by what we just said, that was a podcast episode with Dr. Aditya Nagrath, and I will put a link to that in the show notes. So that was about math anxiety specifically.

So what’s the underlying reason you’re saying for the challenge? Is it because they feel nervous or anxious about it, or because they actually can’t process?

Laura Jackson
Right. So for a dyscalculic, I would say there’s a lot of reasons someone would be anxious about math or would not be doing well in math. But for a dyscalculic, you’ll see that the main reason is they lack a sense of number, or what we call number sense. They really don’t understand how the numbers work together. They don’t understand why a number is even or odd.

They have a hard time memorizing because what they’re memorizing doesn’t have any meaning. So five times five, we could sort of visualize, well, that’s gonna be about 25, even if we can’t remember it exactly. But to a dyscalculic, they’ll say, “I don’t know. Is it 10?” They just have no number sense.

And when you start to peel it back, it becomes very clear that this is different than a student who has ADHD and is just distracted and needs engaging games or an engaging way to think about it. That’s very different than someone who might have working memory issues and has to learn ways to remember or externalize.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yes, how to remember or externalize. It’s not the same as not being able to comprehend the context of it. Okay. Let’s take… Well, finish this up and then let’s take a break and we’ll come back.

Laura Jackson
So I was gonna say, usually with just a few questions, and I usually bring in things outside of math class to kind of tease out, is this just a math class thing? Or, as you and I talked about, are they switching up the numbers and they don’t understand dates? How are they at reading a clock? How are they at estimating how long something takes?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Which could still be both dyslexia…

Laura Jackson
Yeah, or dyscalculia. I know. It gets very… Same with struggling with left and right, but so do dyslexics. And there’s actually, they say there’s like a 40% overlap.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I was gonna say, my kid with one has both. Wait, actually, one of my kids has both. But one of my kids with dyslexia actually is gifted in math, so you just never know.

Laura Jackson
Yes, exactly. You never know. But so you can probably then see the difference between… I also have a second daughter who’s very good at math, and it’s just night and day. The difference.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
It is night and day.

Laura Jackson
Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
My guest is Laura Jackson. We’re talking about one of the lesser understood and lesser known learning disabilities called dyscalculia. I hesitate to ask what percentage of kids have it. Does that feel like an inappropriate question?

What I wanna understand is how common is it, and then really I wanna get into can this change? Is somebody stuck with not understanding number and time for the rest of their life, or is there something we can actually do about it? But first, how common is it?

Laura Jackson
Yeah, how I describe it usually a few different ways and maybe one way will catch with people. So the big number is somewhere between 3 and 8%, so that’s a global research number. I use 5% a lot just because it’s easy to remember. Recently you’ll start seeing people saying 6%.

Well, if you’re not dyscalculic, you understand that’s close enough. If you’re dyscalculic, you’re like, “Is it five or six?” So somewhere around that. The easier way for a dyscalculic to think about it would be one in every 20 people you know. So if there’s a group of 20 people in the room, look around, one of them is dyscalculic.

In the classroom there’s going to be at least one, probably two, in every regular classroom. And if you’re in a small private school that specializes in learning differences, that number could be as high as half the classroom because they draw students who are gifted but also struggling in areas. So that is a higher number than people would expect.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And what jumps at me is that is also reflected in the workplace.

Laura Jackson
Yes, it is.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So we’re not just talking about a classroom, we’re talking about teams and work environments and everywhere we look.

Laura Jackson
Yes. So if you have that…

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
One out of 20 people is gonna have a hard time using a cash register or a calculator.

Laura Jackson
Absolutely. They’re gonna have a hard time reading graphs, understanding data that’s coming in, writing reports that have to do with numbers and quantity.

The Dyscalculia Network in the UK has whole website pages dedicated to adult dyscalculia and dyscalculia in the workplace, and how to create accessible numbers. There’s even a podcast about accessible numbers and creating supports in the workplace.

Because you’re right, this doesn’t go away when you graduate from high school or college. Like dyslexia, it’s a lifelong situation that you learn to work with.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Right. And I guess what I wanna land with is this is why it’s so important to play to our strengths. Because just because a kid has a learning disability in this area doesn’t mean they’re not gonna make it in the world. They could be absolutely brilliant, as your 4.0 kid is, and be extraordinarily successful.

It’s really important to identify what their strengths are so that they can play to those strengths and outsource the challenge areas. They’re not gonna do well in a data-crunching environment, but that doesn’t mean they’re not gonna do well.

Laura Jackson
Yeah. Exactly. I speak with dyscalculic adults all the time in all kinds of fields. I haven’t spoken with as many in heavily numbers-focused careers, but I think that’s because they have other strengths and gravitate toward those strengths. There are psychologists and writers and people all over different fields. There are so many other ways to express yourself in the world.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So let’s talk about how you support people with dyscalculia. It is a mouthful to say.

Laura Jackson
Oh my gosh. Why does it have to be so horrible? Somebody in the ’70s came up with that term.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I live in Atlanta, and there’s a special needs school for kids with dyslexia called The Schenck School. Just spell that that way. Somebody’s not thinking. So anyway, how do we help these kids?

Laura Jackson
These kids and adults? I think the first thing is probably gonna be very similar to any other learning difference, but to have a curiosity about their situation. And this is hard as parents, because sometimes we want a quick fix. But when you start with a place of just open curiosity for their situation and how it is instead of trying to come in and solve their problems, your level of understanding is broadened.

I mean, I was not like this in the beginning. I was the parent with the flashcards, yelling at my kid, “Why can’t you get these? Why can’t you get this?” Doing all the things and frustrated. But now when a new challenge comes up, I say, “Wow, that’s really interesting. Can you tell me where you go, or how do you think about that?”

Laura Jackson
Instead of telling her how it should be done, I ask, “How do you approach that?” When you see that problem, we were doing percentages as a senior in high school talking about sales, and how she solves a percentage problem is different than how I do. And it’s longer, and it takes more time, but you know what? How she does it makes the most sense to her, and she can access it.

So having that curiosity, I think, before you just go out and find a math tutor, which PS doesn’t help the stress and probably doesn’t understand it, right? It doesn’t. And what that does is it doesn’t only help the actual struggle, but it really eases a lot of anxiety. If you can be someone in their life that understands the trickiness.

When they come home and they say, “I bombed that social studies test,” and you say, “Let’s look at those questions that you bombed on,” instead of, “Well, you need to redo it,” or “Why didn’t you study more?”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So curiosity. The other thing that’s coming up for me in what you’re saying, one of the tools we teach in the coach approach besides curiosity is assume best intention. You’re starting with the assumption that they’re not doing this on purpose, that it’s not that they don’t care or that they’re not trying, but that this is a symptom that they’re struggling with something. And when you get curious, you can figure out how to help them with it, is what I’m hearing.

Laura Jackson
Absolutely, Elaine. Yes. I wish more people would listen to you on that because most of these students think they’re stupid. They’re told they’re not trying hard enough.

I work regularly with a student in person at her school, and her math teacher said, “I just want you to try.” And I said, “Show me these questions that are hard.” She shows them to me and I’m like, “Wow, I can see why this is very tricky.”

And just the anxiety in my student was just like, “Oh, yeah.” She’s like, “I don’t know where to start.” And I’m like, “I can see that.” But instead of saying, “I just want you to try,” she was like, “I am trying,” to her teacher.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Well, and that’s another tool you’re using, which is the tool of acknowledgement. If you acknowledge for kids or adults what they’re experiencing, that there’s a reason for them to be experiencing it, that there’s a reason it’s hard, that can actually reduce the stress and allow them to begin to problem solve around it.

But if I feel like I can’t do this and I should be able to, and so now I’m should-ing all over myself, my brain’s no longer available for problem solving.

Laura Jackson
Totally. I mean, Dan Siegel talks about that in his book Parenting From the Inside Out, just that validating of their experience. Exactly. Instead of denying it or pushing it aside and saying, “Oh no, you’re good at math.” But to say, “How is it you feel about it, and what’s tripping you up here?”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Laura, we need to start wrapping the conversation. Let me tell y’all, if you think you or your child or someone in your midst might have some hidden dyscalculia that you don’t know about, or you wanna find out more, you can go to Discovering Dyscalculia. It is spelled exactly how it sounds. And she’s also got a podcast, Discovering Dyscalculia.

So check it out. If you find yourself frustrated with kids who are frustrated with math, get curious, look underneath, and see whether maybe this is what’s going on.

So as we begin to wrap this conversation, is there something we haven’t talked about that you wanna make sure you bring up today, or something we have that you wanna highlight? I wanna give you a chance to close your end of the conversation.

Laura Jackson
Yeah. I would say probably in addition to starting with that slower place of stopping and getting curious, it seems to be really kind of developmental work that helps these students. So the work that’s being done with a lot of these students in the UK, the work I did with my own daughter for three years at home, because I couldn’t after struggling with an IEP for three years, and then the work I’m doing with students and other experts are doing, it’s really going back to this foundational sense of number that they don’t have, and helping them make those connections.

So we don’t just keep moving on and keep trying to force them to figure it out. We go back and work with dot patterns and work with physical objects and really try to make those connections that most people kind of have innately even before kindergarten, and they don’t. So that deep work takes time, but we’re seeing such great results for people later.

Laura Jackson
After doing that with my own daughter, she ended up doing really well in high school after doing that work. And she’ll tell you now, if she wasn’t at school, she’d be like, “If I hadn’t done that work,” like that early dot pattern work and understanding some of these things, “I don’t know where I would be.” It was transformational.

And I think the good news is I get frustrated when I see how discouraged people get. Like, “There’s nothing we can do. There’s nothing we can do with these students. It’s just how it is.” And I just feel like that’s not true. There’s so much we can do emotionally, and there are practically things we can do in our schools and at home to help them make these connections that really help them move forward.

Laura Jackson
And it’s not that they’ll ever not be dyscalculic. But when you have some tools and understanding, you can almost develop a sense of humor. We kind of giggle sometimes with my daughter.

Just like the other day, her sister said to her, “Okay, it was 34.” They were counting something, and my dyscalculic daughter says, “Okay, so 43.” And then she’s like, “Ah,” and starts laughing because she had switched the numbers in writing them down.

And it’s just so much lighter and so much more freeing. She feels so much more able to run with the things that she’s really amazing at, and find support when she doesn’t know how to do the numbers, and have a voice and be able to articulate it to others. It’s so freeing. So that’s all I would add.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
That is a lot. I just really wanna acknowledge that you’re a pioneer in a space that’s complicated and confusing. One of the things when I first started this work, I used to say that these experts expect us parents who have no education in this to become experts on our kids medically and educationally. We turn to the schools and to the doctors and the therapists who have no experience in what we’re dealing with, and then we feel lost.

So for you to get in there and understand it and learn it and then bring that to other parents, I really wanna acknowledge how powerful and important that is, and what a difference it makes not just for the kids you work with, but for others who are struggling, that reminder that yeah, you can figure it out.

Laura Jackson
Yeah. Thank you. I do like people to know, I let my newsletter people and just my community know that I’m in it still with them. Here we are senior year navigating college applications. And so this doesn’t go away. It doesn’t go away.

But yeah, I’m in it with them, trying to look at the deeper-ness and hoping to create more of a sense of community about it and understanding.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. Well, I feel you. We are in it too. Our fastest growing part of our community are parents of young adults because there’s so much isolation out there.

I have a 28-year-old medical student with dyslexia, and when she starts the next round of applications for residencies, guess who’s gonna be in there with her? It does not end. It just changes. And as you say, when they understand themselves well enough to learn to manage themselves and advocate for themselves, it changes everything. It does.

So before we close, do you have a favorite quote or motto that you wanna share with the community?

Laura Jackson
I love Anne Lamott. I love Anne Lamott too. She just seems so wise.

And I don’t know, when you said that, I thought of this quote. It’s really short. I can’t remember which book it’s in, but she says, “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes.”

And I just love that because I’m always saying that to my kids when they have tech problems. But also just myself, that helps me slow down. If I’m frenzied about all the things going on with parenting, to just be like, “How can I pull back and unplug from all the craziness and just take a minute for myself?”

It’s grounding. It’s so silly and playful, but also quite deep.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Laura, thank you. Thanks for being here. Thanks for what you’re doing, and I look forward to more conversation with you at some point in the future.

Laura Jackson
Sounds great. Thank you, Elaine.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
My pleasure. So to those of you listening, take a moment. Ask yourself, what are you taking away from this conversation? What’s your insight, your awareness, your aha? Maybe you’re thinking about a particular kid or family member or yourself. Maybe it was something about some of the advice that Laura gave in terms of curiosity or validation.

And how do you wanna use that insight as you move forward into your week this week? What do you wanna do with that information? How do you wanna apply it?

And as always, my friends, thanks for what you’re doing for yourself, for your kids, for your communities, for your teachers, for your therapists, for everybody. Because when you’re in here doing this work and thinking about this stuff, it’s making a huge difference, and that matters. So thanks for being here, and we’ll see you on the next conversation.