Study Shows How Parents Can Help Their Children Succeed

Children's persistence in the face of challenges is key to learning and academic success. If we teach children to be persistent, they will be guided when trying to succeed in school and beyond. Unfortunately, not much is known regarding how parents and teachers can help encourage persistence in children before they commence formal education.

A study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) looked at interactions of 520 children between the ages of four and five from various socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds and their interaction with adults to determine how they affected the children's persistence.

The study found three things. Firstly, children tried harder after they saw adults succeed than after they saw them fail at a task. Secondly, adults' efforts affected children's persistence, but only when the adults succeeded in their task. Lastly, children's persistence was highest when adults exerted effort at their task, succeeded, and talked about the value of making that effort.

"Our work shows that young children pay attention to the successes and failures of the adults around them and, reasonably, don't persist long at tasks that adults themselves fail to achieve," notes Julia Leonard, MindCore postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the study. "However, we found that when adults could complete a task successfully, speaking about the value of the effort and letting children see the hard work that went into achieving the goal, it encouraged persistence in children who were watching.

Additionally, the study took into account the effect of adults’ words: whether they set expectations for the children's attempts at a task that was designed to be impossible to complete. For example, adults told the children: "This will be hard," gave pep talks by saying something like "You can do this," or offered value statements by saying, for example, "Trying hard is important." There was also a condition in which adults did not say anything about children's expectations. Persistence was measured by how hard the children chose to work at the same task attempted by the adults, which was difficult and new to the children.

These findings indicate that young children are always modeling their behavior after adults, actively learning from their words, efforts, and outcomes and inferring how hard they should try at tasks.

"Our study suggests that children are rational learners--they pay attention first and foremost to whether adults succeed at their goals," says Laura Schulz, professor of cognitive science at MIT, who co-authored the study. "But when adults succeed, children are also watching how hard adults try and what adults say about the value of effort."