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The frequency of home spatial activities (e.g., puzzles and blocks) correlates with young children's spatial skills, but causal evidence is limited. We addressed this issue by comparing the effects of a parent‐led intervention aimed at increasing spatial activities to an active control targeting narrative activities (preregistered:https://osf.io/u7qrx). Parents of 80 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children were randomly assigned to either a spatial or narrative condition. Parents learned about the importance and malleability of spatial or narrative skills and engaged their children in spatial or narrative activities provided by the researchers for a month. Unexpectedly, the spatial intervention did not significantly enhance children's spatial skills or parents' motivational beliefs regarding children's spatial abilities. These findings do not support the hypothesis that spatial play causally influences children's skills. However, we note that the families in our sample had high socioeconomic status, and their children may have already benefited from rich spatial environments. 

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. 

Prior research has shown that the home learning environment (HLE) is critical in the development of spatial skills and that various parental beliefs influence the HLE. However, a comprehensive analysis of the impact of different parental beliefs on the spatial HLE remains lacking, leaving unanswered questions about which specific parental beliefs are most influential and whether inducing a growth mindset can enhance the spatial HLE. To address these gaps, we conducted an online study with parents of 3- to 5-year-olds. We found that parents’ growth mindset about their children’s ability strongly predicted the spatial HLE after controlling for parents’ motivational beliefs about their children, beliefs about their own ability, children’s age, children’s gender, and family SES. Further, reading an article about growth mindset led parents to choose more challenging spatial learning activities for their children. These findings highlight the critical role of parents’ growth mindset in the spatial HLE. Crucially, these findings demonstrate that general growth mindset messages without specific suggestions for parental practices can influence parental behavior intentions. Further, these effects were also observed in the control domain of literacy, underscoring the broad relevance of the growth mindset in the HLE.