Poster #75 - Mothers’ and Fathers’ Motivational Talk to First-Graders: Praise, Enjoyment, and High Expectations

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

Children’s beliefs and attitudes are influenced by environmental factors, which include parents’ attitudes and praise. Previous research suggests that different types of parental praise predict children’s motivational frameworks (Gunderson et al., 2013, 2018; Pomerantz & Kempner, 2013). Specifically, person praise, where the parent refers to static traits about the child (e.g., “you’re smart”), is associated with a fixed motivational framework – a belief that ability is unchangeable. Process praise, where the parent praises an action, is associated with an incremental motivational framework – the belief that ability can be improved through effort. Although prior research has focused on parents’ praise, parents may also impact children’s motivation in other ways, such as by talking about their enjoyment of the task and their expectations about their child’s performance. Moreover, motivational talk from fathers is relatively unexplored, and mothers and fathers may differ in their approach to motivational talk Tamis-LeMonda, Baumwell & Cristofaro, 2012). Therefore, the current study explored the relationships among parent gender, parent praise, liking language (language about enjoying the upcoming task), and positive performance language (language expressing positive expectations of performance). We utilized the Philadelphia sample from the NICHD SECCYD dataset and examined videotaped parent-child interactions in 1st-grade (N=57, 31 girls), in which children completed challenging spatial tasks (Etch-a-Sketch and block construction) separately with each parent. Videos were transcribed and coded for parents’ praise, liking, and expectation language.
Table 1 illustrates the mean proportion of praise, liking, and positive expectation utterances of total utterances or of total praise, and examples of each utterance type. Fathers gave a higher proportion of other praise than mothers, t(55) = 2.91, p = .005 (all analyses were conducted after arcsine transforming percentages). However, mothers gave a significantly higher proportion of person praise than fathers, t(55) = -2.04, p = .046. Both relations remain significant when measuring proportion out of total praise utterances.
We conducted Pearson correlations to examine relations between different types of parent utterances (Table 2). Process praise and other praise were significantly correlated in both father- and mother-child interactions. Further, father-child interactions revealed significant correlations between liking utterances and process praise, and liking and other praise. Conversely, mothers’ person praise and positive expectation utterances were positively correlated.
The relationships between father liking language, process praise, and other praise may suggest that fathers who use more liking language to engage the child in the current task are more likely to praise their child’s current actions. Meanwhile, mothers’ higher use of person praise, and the relationship between person praise and positive performance language, may suggest that mothers who focus more on the potential outcome of the task are likely to praise a child’s traits rather than current actions. These results suggest that process and other praise are given in response to the present action, while person praise appears to be derived from a belief held about the child’s ability, likely developed over time. Future research should investigate whether liking and positive expectation language predict children’s later academic achievement and motivation, as person and process praise do.
 

Authors

• Sarah Pepper, Temple University
  Presenting Author

• Kexin Ren, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Victoria Bartek, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Gunderson, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author