Your kid had their times tables down cold. You heard them rattling off answers in the back seat. You felt that quiet parent relief — okay, we've got this one.

Then two weeks later, they look at 7x8 like it's the first time they've ever seen numbers.

Before you panic — this is not what you think it is.

There's a version of learning we all carry around in our heads. It goes up and to the right. Steady. Measurable. Each day a little more than the day before.

School gave us that picture. Report cards reinforced it. And now, when our kids don't follow it, something in us gets nervous.

The problem is, that picture has almost nothing to do with how the brain actually works.

Learning loops. It stalls. It circles back on itself. And some of what looks like falling behind is actually the opposite — it's the messy, invisible work of something actually sticking.

In the 1880s, a psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus spent years testing his own memory and mapping what happened to new information over time.

What he found was uncomfortable: without reinforcement, we lose a large portion of what we just learned within a short time, and much of the rest fades quickly after.

Sounds bad, right?

But here's the part that changes everything. The material doesn't actually disappear. It gets stored — even when it can't be retrieved.

Researcher Robert Bjork puts it this way: there's a difference between how easily you can pull something up right now (retrieval strength) and how deeply it's actually encoded (storage strength). Retrieval strength drops fast. Storage strength, once it's there, largely stays.

This is why your kid can "forget" something for two weeks and then re-learn it in ten minutes. The path was already there. They just needed to find it again.

That re-learning is often what cements it.

There's something in developmental psychology called U-shaped behavioral growth and once you see it, it shows up everywhere. .

Here's how it goes. A child does something correctly — not because they understand it, but because they've seen it enough times to copy it. Then their brain starts actually building the rule underneath it. And while that's happening, their performance dips. They start applying the rule in places it doesn't quite fit. They seem to be going backward.

Then it clicks. And they come out the other side with something solid.

The most classic example is past tense. Little kids say "went" correctly because they've heard adults say it. Then, once they figure out that past tense usually means adding "-ed," they start saying "goed." Sounds like a mistake. It is a mistake. It's also their brain doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

This same pattern shows up in reading, math, physical skills, pretty much everywhere. The dip in the middle isn't a red flag. It's consolidation.

Every skill has a stretch where visible progress just... stops. Sometimes for weeks. Sometimes longer. The child seems to be going nowhere.

What's actually happening is the brain is doing maintenance. It's reorganizing and automating what it's already learned before it takes on more. It's like a computer running updates in the background — nothing looks different on the screen, but something necessary is happening.

Sleep is a big part of this, by the way. During deep sleep, the brain consolidates the day's learning — strengthening connections, filing new information, pruning what isn't needed. A child who seems stuck might be processing more than you can see.

Non-linear learning isn't the problem. The problem is what happens when we treat it like it is. It often looks like this:

That last one is the one worth sitting with.

When a child starts to believe that forgetting is failure, or that a dip means something is wrong with them, they stop taking risks.

And once they stop taking risks, the actual learning stops too. Not because they can't — because it doesn't feel safe to try.

That’s much harder to recover from than any plateau. If you'd like to learn more, I cover this in greater detail in Why Pressure Makes Learning Harder.

There's research on something called "desirable difficulties" — the idea that conditions making learning feel harder in the short term tend to produce better long-term results. Spacing things out. Mixing up topics. Practicing retrieval before you feel ready.

None of it feels like progress while it's happening. All of it builds something more durable than drilling the same thing until it feels easy.

The kid who works through their spelling words on Wednesday, stumbles, practices again, and gets them right on Friday retains more than the kid who drills them twice on Tuesday and aces the test Thursday.

A lot of the actual learning happens in those mistakes. The stumble is where the work happens.

If a rising line isn't the right measure, what is? A few things worth noticing instead:

Nothing drastic. Just a few responses worth trying.

When they forget something they knew: Don't panic, and try not to signal alarm. Something like "you had this before — let's find it again" tells them their brain is working, not broken.

Humor can help here. I used to joke with my piano students when this happened – it's in there hiding, we just need to shake the cobwebs off! A laugh is a great way to relieve tension.

When progress seems to stall: Resist piling on more. More pressure at a plateau often makes things worse. Sometimes the most useful move is to back off and come back to it later.

Again, when my piano students would get stuck or forget how to play a piece from memory, I would have them do something else, even if only for a few minutes, telling them sometimes the brain needed time to reset. This almost always helped them get past it.

When they seem to be going backward: Ask what they're thinking before correcting. "What made you say that?" keeps them in thinking mode. Jumping to the correction too fast can actually cut the consolidation process short.

Be prepared though, kids have become trained to believe “what made you say that” is code for “you are wrong” and they will often just change their answer. Don't let them do that. Have them answer the question so they think things through.

And be sure to sometimes ask how they got their answer when they are correct too!

When they finally get something that's been hard: Say something about the process, not just the result. "You kept coming back to that even when it was frustrating" is more useful than "see, you got it." One of those things they can repeat. The other was just luck of the day.

Just be sure to pay attention to whether they understood what they were doing or just managed to correctly guess. You want to reward thinking, not just guessing correctly!

Kids are built to learn. Not as a nice thing to say — as a biological fact. Curiosity is their default. Exploration is how they're wired to move through the world.

What gets in the way isn't forgetting, or plateaus, or dips. Those are all normal. What gets in the way is the belief that normal looks like a straight line — and the pressure that follows when it doesn't.

The messy, looping, two-steps-forward-one-step-back version? That's the real thing. It always was.

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