Struggling to Learn and Learning to Struggle: How Difficulty Helps Children Learn Better

Confusion, frustration and the occasional tear over homework are not signs that a child is failing to learn. According to a growing body of research, they may be the surest sign that learning is taking place.

Every parent knows the scene. A child sits at the kitchen table, pencil hovering, brow furrowed, and announces that they simply do not understand. The temptation to intervene is overwhelming: to supply the answer, to explain once more, or to conclude, quietly, that this subject is not for them.

Yet decades of research in cognitive psychology suggest that this instinct, however kindly meant, may do more harm than good. The discomfort of not knowing is not an obstacle to learning. Very often, it is the mechanism by which learning occurs. What follows sets out the evidence, and what it means for the way we support children at home.

The illusion of easy learning

We tend to judge learning by how it feels. When an explanation goes down smoothly and a child nods along, we assume the lesson has landed. When they stumble, we assume it has not.

The research suggests we have this largely the wrong way round. Psychologists distinguish between performance, how well a child appears to be doing in the moment, and learning, what they retain and can use weeks or months later. The two are surprisingly poorly related. Material that feels effortless is frequently forgotten; material that is fought for tends to stay.

Productive struggle

Nowhere is this more evident than in mathematics, and it is here that one of the most influential ideas in modern education took shape. In a widely cited review published in 2007, the American education researchers James Hiebert and Douglas Grouws examined what kinds of teaching help pupils develop genuine conceptual understanding. Among their central findings was that students learn more deeply when they are allowed to grapple with important mathematical ideas, rather than being led through every step.

Their work helped popularise the idea of "productive struggle", which has since become a cornerstone of mathematics teaching. In 2014 the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the world's largest body of maths educators, named "supporting productive struggle" as one of eight essential teaching practices.

The operative word is productive. This is not a matter of leaving children to flounder. Productive struggle describes work pitched just beyond a child's current reach: demanding enough to require real thought, yet close enough that, with persistence and the right encouragement, a breakthrough is possible. The child is stuck, but holds a foothold.

The distinction matters enormously in mathematics. A pupil who is only ever shown a method learns to reproduce it, and often forgets it as soon as the next topic arrives. A pupil who has wrestled with why a method works learns something far more durable: how to reason. Faced with an unfamiliar problem, the first child is lost; the second has somewhere to start. It is, in essence, the difference between remembering mathematics and understanding it.

When your child declares that a maths problem is too hard, it is worth pausing before coming to the rescue. The minutes spent stuck, trying an approach, discarding it and trying another, are precisely where mathematical thinking is built.

Three kitchen tables

To see how this plays out in practice, consider three children, each aged ten, each stuck on the same homework question: a jumper costs £40 and is reduced by 25% in a sale. What is the new price? The children and their parents are invented, but most families will recognise at least one of them.

The rescue. Amelia frowns at the question for barely a minute before calling for help. Her father, keen to spare her any distress, leans over and explains: "Divide 40 by 4, that's 10, take it away from 40. Thirty pounds. Write that down." Amelia writes it down, relieved, and moves on.

The evening is calm, and the homework is complete. But Amelia has learned very little about percentages. What she has learned is something more corrosive: that when a problem feels difficult, the right response is to stop and wait for an adult. A week later, faced with a 15% discount in class, she is stuck again, and this time there is no one to lean over her shoulder. Repeated over months and years, this pattern produces a child who is quick to say "I can't" and slow to try.

The productive struggle. Ben is stuck on the same question. His mother sits beside him but does not reach for the pencil. "What does 25% mean?" she asks. Ben isn't sure. "Is it a big part of the price or a small part?" A smaller part, he thinks. "Could you draw the £40 and show roughly how much comes off?" He draws a bar, hesitates, splits it in half, then in half again. Something clicks: a quarter. He works out £10 and subtracts it, then checks whether the answer looks sensible.

It takes fifteen minutes rather than two, and there is some grumbling along the way. But Ben now understands why the answer is £30, not merely that it is. When the 15% question appears in class, he has a strategy to reach for. He also leaves the table with a small but important piece of evidence about himself: being stuck is not the same as being unable.

The struggle that goes too far. Chloe's parents have read about the value of struggle and are determined not to rescue her. When she says she doesn't understand, they tell her to keep trying. Forty minutes later she is still staring at the page. She has never properly met percentages, has no idea where to begin, and every attempt simply confirms her sense of failure. Eventually she is in tears, and the evening ends with the question unanswered and Chloe convinced she is "rubbish at maths".

Chloe's struggle was real, but it was not productive. She lacked a foothold: the basic understanding needed to make progress. A single well-chosen question, a reminder of an earlier lesson, or a note to her teacher would have turned an impossible task into a challenging one. Struggle without support does not build resilience; it erodes confidence.

The difference between Ben's evening and the other two is not the amount of help given, but its kind. Amelia's father removed the difficulty entirely. Chloe's parents left her alone with it. Ben's mother kept the difficulty in place while giving him just enough to climb it. That, in a sentence, is what productive struggle looks like at home.

Desirable difficulties

The psychologist Robert Bjork has spent much of his career studying a paradox: the conditions that make learning feel hardest are often those that make it last longest. He coined the phrase "desirable difficulties" to describe them.

Among the best documented are testing oneself rather than rereading notes, spacing practice over several days rather than cramming, and mixing different types of problem rather than practising one kind at a time. Each feels slower and more laborious. Pupils, and their parents, frequently conclude that such methods are not working. The evidence says otherwise: the very effort involved is what strengthens memory.

Not every difficulty is desirable, of course. A poorly explained task or an impossible leap helps no one. The skill lies in finding challenge that a child can, with effort, overcome.

Productive failure

The learning scientist Manu Kapur has pushed the argument further still. In a series of studies, he asked pupils to attempt mathematical problems before they had been taught how to solve them. Most, predictably, failed. But when those pupils were subsequently taught the correct method, they understood it more deeply, and applied it more flexibly, than classmates who had been given the instruction first.

Kapur calls this "productive failure". The early, unsuccessful attempts are not wasted. They expose what a child does not yet know, prompt them to explore different approaches, and leave them genuinely curious about the answer. When the explanation finally arrives, it has something to take hold of.

The uses of confusion

If struggle is valuable, what of the confusion that accompanies it? Research led by the cognitive scientist Sidney D'Mello suggests that confusion, too, can be beneficial, provided it is eventually resolved. Confusion is, in effect, the mind registering that something does not fit. The work of reconciling the contradiction is what produces understanding.

The qualification is important. Confusion that is worked through deepens learning; confusion that persists without any way forward curdles into discouragement. The task for parents and teachers is not to eliminate the former, but to prevent it becoming the latter.

Why it matters beyond the classroom

The benefits extend well beyond any particular topic. Children who come to see difficulty as a normal part of learning develop a disposition that will serve them for life: the capacity to stay with a problem. They expect challenges, and they have learned from experience that challenges can be overcome.

Children who are routinely spared difficulty risk learning a very different lesson: that if something feels hard, they must be bad at it. It is a belief that tends to harden with age, and one that can lead a pupil to abandon a subject at precisely the moment it begins to demand more of them.

When worry becomes catching

For many children, difficulty brings anxiety. A hard question becomes evidence of a deeper verdict: "I'm no good at this." It is an understandable conclusion, and an entirely mistaken one.

Parents, naturally, feel their children's distress keenly, and anxiety has a way of spreading. A child's frustration becomes a parent's alarm: perhaps they are not studying properly, perhaps they are falling behind, perhaps something must be done. The parent's concern, in turn, confirms the child's fear that struggling is a sign of failure. Before long, both are working hard to avoid the very experience that would help the child learn.

Part of the problem lies in what we choose to celebrate. At home and at school alike, we tend to reward the answer: the tick, the full marks, the finished worksheet. Yet the answer is only the destination. The learning happens on the journey: in the false starts, the second attempts and the moment when an idea finally makes sense. A child praised only for correct answers soon learns to fear the struggle that precedes them. A child praised for persevering learns to value it.

This calls for a quiet but significant change of emphasis. Instead of asking "Did you get it right?", we might ask "What did you try?" or "What was the hardest part?" Instead of treating difficulty as a problem to be solved as quickly as possible, we can treat it as the point of the exercise. Struggle, rightly understood, is not a detour from learning. It is the road itself.

Parents can go further than simply tolerating struggle: they can actively look for it and reward it. When a child sits with a hard problem rather than giving up, rubs out an attempt and tries again, or says "I don't understand this yet, but I'm working on it", that is the moment to notice and to celebrate. It deserves the same warmth and recognition we usually save for a good mark. "I saw how long you stuck with that" or "I love that you tried a different way when the first one didn't work" tells a child, more powerfully than any lecture, that difficulty is something to be proud of rather than ashamed of. Children quickly learn what the adults around them value. If we reward the struggle, they will learn to embrace it, and in doing so, they will be far better equipped to overcome the challenges that await them, not only in their education but throughout their lives.

This idea has support in the work of the psychologist Carol Dweck, best known for her research on "growth mindset". Dweck and her colleagues found that children praised for their effort and strategies were more willing to take on challenging tasks than children praised for being clever. Later studies suggest the benefits are real, if more modest than early headlines implied. Dweck herself adds an important caution: praise should go to effort that is leading somewhere. A child who is trying new approaches, asking questions or learning from mistakes deserves recognition; a child who has simply stared at the page for forty minutes, like Chloe, needs help instead. It is productive struggle, not struggle for its own sake, that we should reward.

How parents can help

None of this requires parents to become maths teachers. It requires, rather, a shift in how we respond when a child is stuck.

• Treat struggle as normal. A simple "this is meant to feel tricky" can transform how a child interprets their own difficulty.

• Resist the urge to rescue. Allow a few minutes of quiet thought before offering help. Silence is often productive.

• Ask rather than tell. "What do you understand so far?" or "What have you tried?" keeps the thinking with the child.

• Praise effort and strategy. "You kept going when it was hard" builds more resilience than "You're so clever".

• Admit your own struggles. Children benefit from seeing adults find things difficult, and persevere.

• Return to it later. A break is not surrender. Coming back to a problem the next day strengthens memory.

• Know when to step in. If a child is entirely lost, a small hint, or a word with their teacher, can turn unproductive frustration back into productive struggle.

A final word

When a child says "I don't get it", it is worth hearing the word they have left out: yet. Confusion is not the opposite of learning; it is very often the way in. In helping children grow comfortable with not knowing, we give them something more valuable than any single answer: the confidence to keep going when learning becomes hard.

Further2 reading

For parents

• Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Harvard University Press, 2014)

• Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School? (Jossey-Bass, 2009)

• Jo Boaler, Mathematical Mindsets (Jossey-Bass, 2016)

• Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Random House, 2006)

The research

• James Hiebert and Douglas A. Grouws, "The effects of classroom mathematics teaching on students' learning", in F. K. Lester (ed.), Second Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning (2007)

• National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All (2014)

• Elizabeth L. Bjork and Robert A. Bjork, "Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning", in Psychology and the Real World (2011)

• Manu Kapur, "Productive failure", Cognition and Instruction, 26 (2008)

• Sidney D'Mello, Blair Lehman, Reinhard Pekrun and Art Graesser, "Confusion can be beneficial for learning", Learning and Instruction, 29 (2014), 153–170

© 2025 Atolan Academy Ltd 16866233

+44 (0)207 0461171

+44 (0)208 1501570

71-75 Shelton Street,

Covent Garden,

London,

WC2H 9JQ

Atolan Academy

Refund Policy

Privacy Policy

Our Commitment