Children’s interpretive theory of mind: The role of mothers’ personal epistemologies and mother-child talk about interpretation

Abstract

We investigated the relations between mothers’ conceptions of knowledge (i.e., personal epistemologies; PEs), mother-child talk about interpretation, and the development of 6- to 8-year-old children’s interpretive theory of mind (IToM). Mothers with complex PEs attempted to elicit more talk about interpretation and had children who produced more of such talk than mothers with simpler PEs. Additionally, the complexity of mothers’ PEs and the frequency of mother-child talk about interpretation were both positively correlated with children’s IToM. When family income and child age were considered, mothers’ PEs positively predicted children’s IToM, whereas mother-child interpretive talk did not. Furthermore, the relationship between mothers’ PEs and children’s IToM was strongest for those dyads that engaged in lesser amounts of interpretive talk. These results suggest that mothers’ PEs are important for understanding children’s social-cognitive development and that the conversational context provides a setting in which talk about important psychological phenomena facilitates children’s growing understanding of knowledge.