Parental beliefs, parental accuracy, and children's cognitive performance: A search for causal relations.

Abstract

This study examined the accuracy with which parents can judge their children's cognitive abilities, as well as the relation between parental accuracy and the level of the child's performance. Subjects were 50 second-and fifth-grade children, their mothers, and fathers. Each child responded to five cognitive tasks, and each parent predicted both how his or her child would perform and how children in general would perform on each task. Parents proved moderately but far from perfectly accurate, the dominant error being to overestimate their own child's ability. Accuracy did not vary as a function of the age or sex of the child or the sex of the parent; it did vary across tasks, however, and was greater for children in general than for the parent's own child. As in past research, accuracy was positively related to the child's performance: More accurate parents tended to have more competent children. The Discussion considers various explanations for this finding.This study was supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. We are grateful to the staff, children, and parents of Littlewood, Talbot, and Wiles Schools, Gainesville, Florida, for their cooperation. We also thank Barbara Rogers for her assistance with the testing, and James Algina and Juliet Brown for their help with statistical analyses.

Signal‐detection Properties of Verbal Self‐reports

“…For example, parents, as the primary verbal community early in life, might be one important social influence on self-evaluation. It is interesting to note, therefore, that American parents consistently overestimate their children's abilities (Gretarsson & Gelfand, 1988;Heriot & Schmickel, 1967;Miller, Manhal, & Mee, 1991 Svenson, 1981), and Chinese employees tend to rate their job performance more realistically (Fahr, Dobbins, & Cheng, 1991). Similarly, American students, who score relatively low on mathematics achievement tests, tend to judge their math skills positively, whereas Chinese students, who score relatively high, tend to judge their skills less positively (Stevenson, Chen, & Lee, 1993;Stevenson, Lee, & Stigler, 1986).…”

Development of Achievement Motivation

“…Schneider & Coleman, 1993). Along with others, Eccles (1993) • Beliefs about the external barriers to success coupled with beliefs regarding both effective strategies to overcome these barriers and their own sense of efficacy to implement these strategies for each child Such beliefs and messages, particularly those associated with parents' perceptions of their children's competencies and likely success, influence children's self-beliefs and task beliefs (e.g., Fredricks & Eccles, 2002;Frome & Eccles, 1998;Miller, Manhal, & Mee, 1991;Pallas, Entwisle, Alexander, & Stluka, 1994; H. W. Stevenson et al, 1990). For example, parents' perceptions of their adolescents' abilities are significant predictors of adolescents' estimates of their own ability and interest in math, English, and sports even after the significant positive relation of the child's actual performance to both the parents' and adolescents' perceptions of the adolescents' domain-specific abilities is controlled (Eccles, 1993;Fredricks & Eccles, 2002;Jacobs, 1992;Jacobs & Eccles, 1992).…”

Mothers’ Predictions of their Son’s Executive Functioning Skills: Relations to Child Behavior Problems

“…Parental inaccuracies in predicting child skills may vary in both magnitude (i.e., the size of the discrepancy between parental knowledge and the child's actual skills) and directionality (i.e., whether the parent over-or under-estimates the child's skills). Although, as already noted, parents most commonly over-estimate their child's intellectual abilities, relations between parental accuracy and child performance have been demonstrated using both directional and absolute magnitude measures of parental accuracy [3]. Indeed, the ''match hypothesis'' of Hunt and Paraskevopoulos [2] would argue that it is the absolute degree of discrepancy between parental knowledge and child ability which is important, as parental errors of either over-or under-estimation will result in insensitive parenting that is not matched to the child's ability.…”

“…Research examining the accuracy of parental knowledge regarding child cognitive skills has focused primarily on general intellectual or academic skills [1][2][3] or on parental knowledge of developmental levels in infants and very young children [4]. These studies support the conclusions that parents are, at best, only moderately accurate in their knowledge of child cognitive skills, that the most common errors are parental over-estimations of their child's ability, and that more accurate parental knowledge is related to greater child cognitive ability.…”