From Parents to Children: Distinct Relationships of Self-Reported and Child-Perceived Parental Mindsets With Children’s Mindsets

• In Event: The What and How of Parents’ Socialization: Exploring the Bridging Role of Children’s Psychological Processes

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was two-fold. First, we aimed to investigate whether children accurately perceived their parents’ math mindsets and how these perceptions, along with parents’ self-reported mindsets, related to children’s own mindsets in math. Second, we tested whether parental mindsets interacted with parental expectations to predict children’s perceptions of parental mindsets and children’s mindsets in math.
Understanding the origins of children’s mindsets is crucial, given the significant impact students’ mindsets have on their motivation and learning (Blackwell et al., 2007; Burnett et al., 2013). Parental mindsets have been proposed as a social antecedent of children’s mindsets, but their influence has generally been insubstantial (e.g., Gunderson et al., 2013). One explanation for this weak connection is the difficulty of children in accurately perceiving their parents’ mindsets due to the implicit nature of these beliefs (Haimovitz & Dweck, 2016) and children’s relative cognitive immaturity in correctly discerning their parents’ mindsets. What may be more important than the actual parental mindset, this reasoning suggests, is how parental mindsets are construed by children. While the direct influence of parental mindsets may be limited, perceived parental mindsets may exert significant influences on students’ mindsets (Authors, in press; Kim, 2023). However, only limited research to date has examined the role of child-perceived parental mindsets or compared the self-reported and child-perceived parental mindsets. It was thus our goal to examine the relationships among parental mindsets, children’s perceptions of parental mindsets, and children’s own mindsets. Building on previous research indicating that parental mindsets work together with parental expectations to determine student outcomes (Pomerantz & Dong, 2006), we also tested the moderating role of parental expectations in these relationships.
Participants were 467 third- and fourth-graders and their parents (377 mothers) in three elementary schools in Korea who participated in a math motivation intervention project. The data for this research were collected before the onset of the intervention (see Table 1). In all analyses, children’s gender and prior math achievement scores were controlled for.
Structural equation modeling (SEM) showed that parental fixed mindset positively predicted child-perceived parental fixed mindset, whereas parental growth mindset did not significantly predict either child-perceived parental growth mindset or fixed mindset (Figure 1). Child-perceived parental growth mindset positively predicted children’s growth mindset. Conversely, the child-perceived parental fixed mindset negatively predicted children’s growth mindset and positively predicted children’s fixed mindset. A latent moderated structured approach revealed significant moderating effects of parental expectations on the relationship between parental growth mindset and children’s fixed mindset. Simple slopes analysis indicated that parental growth mindset positively predicted children’s fixed mindset only when parental expectations were at and below the mean (Figure 2).
While children perceived their parents’ fixed mindset more or less accurately, their perceptions of their parents’ growth mindset did not align with their parents’ self-reported growth mindset. Our findings underscore the significance of parental mindsets as perceived by children rather than reported by parents and highlight the role of parental expectations in defining the relationships between the mindsets of parents and children.

Authors

• Sungwha Kim, Korea University - Brain and Motivation Research Institute

• Hyun Ji Lee, The Ohio State University

• Mimi Bong, Korea University