How Adults’ Actions, Outcomes, and Testimony Affect Preschoolers’ Persistence

Abstract

Across four experiments, we looked at how four and five-year-olds' (n=520) task persistence was affected by observations of adult actions (high or low effort), outcomes (success or failure) and testimony (setting expectations-"This will be hard", pep talks-"You can do this", value statements-"Trying hard is important", and baseline). Across experiments, outcomes had the biggest impact: preschoolers consistently tried harder after seeing the adult succeed than fail. Additionally, adult effort affected children's persistence, but only when the adult succeeded. Finally, children's persistence was highest when the adult both succeeded and practiced what she preached: exerting effort while testifying to its value.

Children Persist Less When Adults Take Over

“…Next, the experimenter took away the puzzle stimuli and introduced the child to another toy. The baseline condition did not have a pre-puzzle phase in order to see how children interacted with the persistence toy with no prior information (just as in Leonard, Garcia, & Schulz, 2019) ways, but in actuality could only be opened with a secret notch that was glued shut. We chose the wooden box task for our dependent measure because it was novel, not clearly within or outside of children's ability range, and unlikely to be related to IQ since it is unsolvable and offers no affordances to track progress.…”

“…For example, infants make more attempts to activate a toy after watching an experimenter effortfully succeed in reaching her goals on two different toys (Leonard, Lee, & Schulz, 2017). Similarly, preschoolers spend more time trying to open a secretly impossible box after watching an experimenter put in effort to open a similar box (Leonard, Garcia, & Schulz, 2019; see also Zimmerman & Blotner, 1979). This effect is amplified when the adult also states aloud that she values hard work (Leonard et al, 2019).…”

“…Similarly, preschoolers spend more time trying to open a secretly impossible box after watching an experimenter put in effort to open a similar box (Leonard, Garcia, & Schulz, 2019; see also Zimmerman & Blotner, 1979). This effect is amplified when the adult also states aloud that she values hard work (Leonard et al, 2019).…”

Daily fluctuations in young children’s persistence

“…Parents were not able to accurately predict which variables shaped brushing in their own children, but their guesses were consistent with the overall importance of parent encouragement and child mood. Although a great deal of work has explored persistence in infants and preschoolers using correlational and causal methods (e.g., Banerjee & Tamis-LeMonda, 2007;Leonard et al, 2017Leonard et al, , 2020Lucca et al, 2019;Prendergast & MacPhee, 2018;Zimmerman & Blotner, 1979), this is the first study to specifically study persistence in three-year-olds using intensive repeated measures.…”

“…Parent encouragement and praise are positively correlated with children's persistence on laboratory tasks (Deater-Deckard et al, 2006;Frodi et al, 1985;Kelley et al, 2000;Lucca et al, 2019;Prendergast & MacPhee, 2018). Experimental work has shown a causal impact of adult encouragement on persistence: children persist longer if an adult verbally reinforces on-task behavior (Krantz & Scarth, 1979) and praises their effort over their ability (Cimpian, et al, 2007;Mueller & Dweck, 1998;Van Hecke & Tracy, 1987), but findings on the strength of pep talks are mixed (Leonard et al, 2020). Parent encouragement fluctuates from day to day, which may have downstream consequences on their child's behavior.…”