About this session

Thursday, 11:50 AM - 1:20 PM

Parents’ involvement in learning: Balancing guidance and autonomy to improve children’s social and cognitive outcomes

Young children learn new skills every day, from tying shoes to making friends. In these effortful moments, parents wonder: How much should I help, and how much should I let my child figure it out on their own? Despite the importance of these parenting decisions, limited research has examined how caregivers can strike the balance between guidance and autonomy to best support children’s learning across domains. This symposium addresses this gap by integrating experimental, observational, and psychophysiological methods to explore the causes and consequences of parenting decisions around providing autonomy for children’s peer relationships, STEM learning, and executive functioning.

Paper 1 presents evidence that adult intervention – whether heavy-handed or light-handed – can help 5-11-year-old children form peer connections, with light-handed intervention even helping children overcome ingroup biases. In contrast, Paper 2 shows that adult intervention can hinder STEM learning: 4-7-year-old children are more engaged in circuit-building tasks when parents do not take the lead. Paper 3 finds that providing children with choices relates to better executive functioning skills in 2-5-year-old children. Finally, Paper 4 explores why some parents intervene more and finds that parents with lower incomes are more likely to take over during challenging tasks, potentially due to stress-related factors.

Collectively, this symposium suggests that autonomy-supportive parenting is multifaceted and has different effects across domains. While parent intervention can help children’s social relationships, too much directiveness can harm STEM learning. Providing children with choices and reducing parental stress may be vital components of autonomy-supportive parenting, helping children thrive.

Paper #1
Title	How Adults’ Behavior Affects Children’s Peer Connection Formation
Presenting author	Eren Fukuda, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Paper #2
Title	Examining Baseline Relations Among Parent-Child Interactions, STEM Learning and Engagement
Presenting author	Skyler Gin, Brown University, United States

Paper #3
Title	Parent Provision of Choice Predicts Executive Function in Preschool Children
Presenting author	Stephanie M. Carlson, University of Minnesota, United States

Paper #4
Title	Lower Family Income Predicts Overparenting Across Four Datasets
Presenting author	Reut Shachnai, Yale University

View all paper details

Session chair
Reut Shachnai, Yale University,

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