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Title: “This is hard!” Children’s and parents’ talk about difficulty during dyadic interactions
Children’s beliefs about the contribution of effort and ability to success and failure shape their decisions to persist or give up on challenging tasks, with consequences for their academic success. But how do children learn about the concept of “challenge”? Prior work has shown that parents’ verbal responses to success and failure shape children’s motivational beliefs. In this study, we explore another type of talk - parent and child talk about difficulty - which could contribute to children’s motivational beliefs. We performed secondary analyses of two observational studies of parent-child interactions in the United States (Boston and Philadelphia) from age 3 to 4th grade (Study 1, 51% girls, 65.5% White, at least 43.2% below Federal poverty line) and at 1st grade (Study 2, 54% girls, 72% White, family income-to-needs ratio M(SD) = 4.41(2.95)) to identify talk about difficulty, characterize the content of those statements, and assess whether task context, child and parent gender, child age, and other parent motivational talk were associated with quantity of child and parent difficulty talk. We found that many families did discuss difficulty, with variation among families. Parents and children tended to use general statements to talk about difficulty (e.g., “That was hard!”), and task context affected child and parent difficulty talk. In the NICHD-SECCYD dataset, mothers’ highlighting how task features contributed to task difficulty was positively correlated with their process praise, suggesting that this talk could be motivationally relevant.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1760144 2452066
PAR ID:
10495963
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Developmental Psychology
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Developmental Psychology
Volume:
59
Issue:
7
ISSN:
0012-1649
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1268 to 1282
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
Motivational Frameworks, Academic Achievement, Parent-child Interactions
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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