Frustration at the kitchen table is rarely about the maths. It is about feeling stuck and watched at the same time. The words you reach for in that moment matter more than the explanation that follows.
The most useful shift is from fixing to noticing. "Let me show you" puts you in charge of the problem; "Where does it stop making sense?" hands the thinking back to your child and tells them that being stuck is a normal, locatable thing rather than a verdict on them.
A handful of low-temperature phrases — naming the difficulty, normalising the pause, and praising the attempt rather than the answer — do more to keep a child practising than any amount of getting the question right tonight.