Cooking counts: within- and between-family variability in math talk while parents and children cook together

The home math environment is a critical context for children’s math development. Within the home environment, cooking is a meaningful, routine which affords parent-child talk about number and math concepts; yet, families vary in their math engagement during cooking. The current study extends prior research on family math engagement by examining naturalistic observations of both parent and child number talk during cooking in the home environment over multiple sessions. Families were provided with cookbooks (with or without number talk tips) and recorded four sessions of cooking at home with their preschool-aged child. Findings indicated wide variability in number talk, within and between families, that adult number prompts, rather than number statements, predicted child number talk, and that relations between adult and child number talk were stronger for families that received number talk tips. Together, these results have implications for family math engagement and children’s math learning, development, and achievement.