The Influence of Caregiver Talk on Young Children's Persistence

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

How can caregivers help young children try their hardest and reach their goals? This set of talks focuses on caregiver speech in semi-naturalistic and naturalistic environments to provide insight into how caregiver guidance supports young children’s persistence. Paper 1 investigates whether praise that links trying to success facilitates persistence for 18-month-olds during an independent task. Well-timed parental praise, which linked children’s effort and success, was uniquely associated with greater persistence. However, praise offered indiscriminately negatively influenced persistence. Paper 2 further illuminates the role of caregiver language by using a novel intensive repeated measures design to examine the relationship between parental stress and mental health, and child sensitivity to praise. During teeth brushing, 3-year-old children whose parents had higher stress and/or a history of mental illness were less sensitive to praise. Paper 3 adds a sociocultural component, exploring how parents’ verbal guidance through question-asking during a challenging task is tied to cultural practices. Chinese immigrant and European American mothers asked a similar number of questions in collaborative problem-solving tasks with their 2.5- to 4-year-old children, but they emphasized different types of questions. Furthermore, mothers’ question-asking was sensitive to the task context. The discussant will connect this body of work to research on how children’s experiences influence their motivation more broadly. Together, these talks elucidate the role of caregiver scaffolding in children’s persistence, offering diverse methods for studying this crucial question within the first years of life.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Samantha Basch, University of California - Santa Cruz

Discussant

• Allyson P Mackey, University of Pennsylvania

Individual Presentations

• Too Much of a Good Thing: Temporal Alignment is Critical to the Efficacy of Caregiver Process Praise - Presenting Author: Tim Wei-Ting Chao, University of Toronto; Mia Radovanovic, University of Toronto; Antonia K Soldovieri, University of Toronto; Shraddha Bhatt, University of Toronto; Irem Ciraci, University of Toronto; Jessica A Sommerville, University of Toronto

• Child Sensitivity to Parent Praise Varies by Parent Mental Health - Presenting Author: Cassidy McDermott, University of Pennsylvania; Christina Beavers, Seattle University; Julia Anne Leonard, Yale University; Allyson P Mackey, University of Pennsylvania

• Cultural Variation in Parents’ Question-Asking with Young Children in Challenging Problem-Solving Activities - Presenting Author: Samantha Basch, University of California - Santa Cruz; Su-hua Wang, University of California - Santa Cruz; Yu Zhang, University of Chicago