Parental factors and home environment found to play a role in student math abilities A pair of researchers at the University of Sussex has  found that the kind of relationship a child has with his or  her parents can have a major impact on how well they do  in learning math at school. In their paper published in the  journal  Royal Society Open Science , Danielle Evans  and Andy Field describe their study of data from an  ongoing research effort aimed at learning about how  children grow up in the U.K. and what they learned from it. The United Kingdom is in the midst of what the authors describe as a "maths crisis." Half of all adults in the U.K., they claim, have  math skills  no better than what would be expected of a child in kindergarten. Such deficiencies are seen as a threat to employment opportunities and give rise to higher rates of people living at the lower end of the economic spectrum. To better understand the origins of the crisis, t