About this session

Saturday, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Parents' Lay Theories of Cognitive Development

Many Developmental Psychologists share the goal of reaching parents and caregivers to shape their practices. However, effectively engaging this crucial audience requires understanding their baseline beliefs about children's minds. This symposium examines parents’ lay theories of cognitive development across the diverse domains of prejudice (P1), ability (P2), and number (P3). Each paper brings together data from children and their parents/caregivers:

P1 finds that parents grossly underestimate their own children's prejudices, across diverse parents (e.g., in political views, education levels) and diverse forms of prejudice (e.g., race, class, disability, sexuality, and weight). Moreover, patterns in parents' underestimates reveal mistaken intuitive theories of the mechanisms underlying prejudice development.

P2 finds that parents widely underestimate preschoolers' ability to complete various familiar and novel tasks. Subsequent studies found that these misconceptions led parents to take over more during the tasks, reducing children's opportunities for learning.

P3 finds that parents overestimate their children's number knowledge, which in turn leads them to misguided conclusions about what type of input would effectively advance their children’s number learning. Optimistically, an intervention providing parents with basic research on numerical development successfully reduced these misconceptions.

What can account for parents’ optimism in some domains (e.g., number, prejudice) but pessimism in others (e.g., ability)? Moreover, what can researchers do to target parents’ intuitive misconceptions about cognitive development to support more effective parenting practices? These and other questions will be discussed by a senior expert on intuitive theories (and parent himself) who has published books on cognitive development for lay audiences.

Paper #1
Title	Parents Consistently Underestimate their Children’s Prejudices
Presenting author	Rebecca Peretz-Lange, Vassar College, United States

Paper #2
Title	Parents Underestimate Preschoolers’ Capabilities which may Undermine their Parenting Practices
Presenting author	Reut Shachnai, Yale University

Paper #3
Title	The Implications of Caregivers’ Knowledge of Numerical Development on their Beliefs about Effective Input
Presenting author	Dominic Gibson, Ph.D., foundry10, USA

View all paper details

Session chair
Rebecca Peretz-Lange, Vassar College, United States

Discussant
Dr. Andrew E. Shtulman, Ph.D., Occidental College, United States

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