Cognitive reflection and authoritarianism relate to how parents respond to children’s science questions.

Abstract

When children ask questions about science, parents use a variety of strategies to answer them, including providing accurate information, connecting to prior knowledge, or simply saying "I do not know." This study examines the factors underlying individual differences in parental explanatory characteristics. Parents (N = 148; M age = 38; 84% female, 16% male; 58% with White American children; 67% having completed college; 49% with household income over $75,000) of children ages 7 to 10 answered eight questions about biology as if they were responding to their child. They also completed three measures of different aspects of reasoning and values: the Picture Vocabulary Test (PVT) to measure verbal intelligence (Gershon et al., 2013), the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT;Toplak et al., 2014), which measures the tendency to override intuitive but incorrect responses to engage in reflective thinking, and the Authoritarianism Scale (Feldman & Stenner, 1997), which measures a parent's preference for encouraging obedience toward authority figures over encouraging their child's autonomy. Our findings support that different factors are associated with different explanatory characteristics. Parents high in reflective thinking tend to provide more connections to other knowledge in their explanations, while parents high in authoritarianism tend to provide fewer references to uncertainty and how to manage it. Implications for effective parent-child communication and children's scientific understanding will be discussed.

A framework for understanding reasoning errors: From fake news to climate change and beyond

“…Interestingly, this also translates to how parents respond to questions about science from their children. In particular, parents who are more analytical tend to provide connections to other knowledge when explaining things to children (as opposed to those who are more authoritarian, who tend to minimize uncertainty) (Mills et al, 2022).…”

What else will I do when I start school? Preschoolers’ wh-questions in dinnertime conversations and their language development

“…Second, as previously mentioned, our analysis did not include family members’ responses. Although it is well documented that wh -questions encourage enriched responses and conversation exchanges, a recent study by Mills et al (2022) suggests that parental responses vary considerably depending on their personal characteristics and parenting style. Hence, future studies should examine the nuances of caregivers’ responses to children’s wh -questions and investigate their potential link to children’s language development.…”

COVID-19, Family Dynamics, and Perceived Mental Health Among Families in Singapore

“…This questionnaire focuses on how much parents endorse authoritarian values—the belief that for children, submitting to established authorities and social convention is more important than maintaining their autonomy. Previous research has shown that parental authoritarianism influences both parent-child interaction (Mills et al 2022 ) and parental mental health (Wu et al 2020 ). In this study, parents were asked to choose the quality they thought was more important for a child to possess (out of a pair): respect for elders or independence, curiosity or good manners, obedience or self-reliance, being considerate or being well-behaved.…”