How do parents influence student creativity? Evidence from a large-scale survey in China

Abstract

This study focuses on parental influences on student general and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) creative ideation behaviors (CIB). It examines the direct and indirect relationships between parent support for general creativity, parent creative self-efficacy, student creative self-efficacy, and student general and STEM CIB with a large-scale dataset collected from over 5,000 students and their parents in different regions of China. Through the use of Structural Equation Modeling, this study found that parent support and creative self-efficacy significantly predicted student creative self-efficacy, which strongly predicted student general and STEM CIB. Although these two parental variables did not directly predict student general and STEM CIB, they both indirectly predicted student general and STEM CIB through the effect of student creative self-efficacy, which established the significant indirect effects of student creative self-efficacy between parental factors and student CIB. These findings were discussed in the context of creativity literature.