How fear leads to failure.

[dreadedcandiru2]

To be fair to Mike, it's sort of easy to see where his fear and hatred of math came from: a teacher who whooped and hollered at him like a big, stupid idiot because he counted on his fingers. What this taught him is that numbers are unfair and wrong and bad and stooped because he wasn't immediately good at math and didn't like situations where he was made to look foolish. As the years went on, basic arithmetic congealed into his brain as this horrible obstacle that no one could be good at. What didn't help was a mother who told him flat-out that he'd made his homework into this big horrible thing that he'd let pile up because he was afraid only to have it become really impossible.

This is because she's not really practicing what she preaches because her great big impossible job is ironing clothes. While John sees it as being a wonderfully simple task that he doesn't have to devote much brain power to, Elly was brought up believing that ironing was this horrible chore that was next to do properly owing to her mother's stupid refusal to understand that her child sincerely believed that if what she did is not quite right, she's not worth feeding. Marian's block-headed inability to admit that encouraging words wouldn't destroy her child left us a paranoid mess raising paranoid messes who overreact to the least bit of disappointment.