Exploring Relations Between Parent and Child Factors and Parental Praise to Preschool-Aged Children

• In Event: Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Studies suggest that parental praise about children’s efforts (i.e., process praise) may set a foundation for children to develop an incremental motivational framework and thus be more likely to attribute success to hard work (Gunderson et al., 2013; Gunderson et al., 2018). In contrast, children whose parents praise their inherent abilities (i.e., use person praise) more frequently tend to exhibit less motivation to learn and avoid challenge (Pomerantz & Kempner, 2013). Further, parental praise to toddlers during dyadic interactions in the home are associated with children’s math and reading comprehension in elementary school through children’s trait beliefs (Gunderson et al., 2018). To examine potential factors that may drive parents’ use of praise, the present study explored whether parent or domain-general child characteristics were associated with the type and frequency of parents’ praise with their 4-year-old children. 127 dyads (50% girls, 94% mothers) were observed interacting with a picture book, grocery store toys, and a puzzle for 5 to 8 minutes each. Parents’ praise utterances were coded into three categories: “person praise”, “process praise”, and “other praise” (i.e., generic praise lacking a specific target, such as “wow” or “great”). The proportion of praise utterances out of total utterances was calculated for each task, then summed across all tasks. Also, parents responded to questionnaire items about parental stress, education, and beliefs about early childhood education and mindsets. Child factors included a executive function assessments: a card sorting task where children are asked to adapt to changing dimensional sorting rules; and a task where children are told to do the opposite of an instruction given by the administrator. Overall, parents used “other praise” more than “person praise” or “process praise” with their children. Correlation analyses with pairwise deletion revealed that the proportion of parents’ total praise in all activities related to parents’ education level (r=.30, p=.001). Further, the proportion of parents’ “other praise” was associated with parental mindset (r=-.25, p=.006), such that parents with a more fixed mindset used less “other praise” while parents with more of a growth mindset used more “other praise”. This finding is surprising, and we hypothesize that the null associations with “process praise” may be due to the relatively low occurrence of this type of input in our sample. It is possible that parents are more used to using more general forms of feedback for children at this age. No other correlations reached statistical significance, including children’s EF and parents’ beliefs about early education. This study can inform parenting practices related to motivation socialization that may benefit children’s future academic success. Future directions for this research will involve exploring child factors that may influence parents’ use of process praise, and considering additional types of parent feedback, such as nonverbal praise or confirmations of children’s utterances.

Authors

• Juliana Kammerzell, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Shirley Duong, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Natalie Heywood, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Margaret Isaacson, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Melissa E Libertus, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Heather J. Bachman, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author