Abstract
Mindset is a term commonly used to represent an individual’s beliefs about the role of ability and effort in learning. In this study, we assessed parental mindset—ability mindset and effort mindset—for 497 parents in two countries (United States and Denmark), all of whom had at least one child between 3 and 5 years of age. Of primary interest was assessing the relations between parental mindset and home-learning activities of four types: family learning activities, learning extensions, parental time investment, and parental school involvement. Findings showed that parents in the United States and Denmark held similar ability and effort mindsets, but differed significantly in home-learning activities, with US parents providing significantly more family learning activities, learning extensions, and parental time investment than Danish parents, although the latter had significantly higher levels of school investment. Furthermore, findings showed that parents’ effort mindset was a significant predictor of family learning activities and parental time investment and that country moderated the relations between effort mindset and parental time investment. For US parents, higher levels of effort mindset were associated with higher levels of parental time investment, but this was not the case for Danish parents. We call for experimental work to determine the causal relations between parental mindset and home-learning activities, and rigorous cross-cultural research to explore the universality of parental mindset in distinctive cultural settings.
Highlights
The experiences we have in early childhood profoundly shape the rest of our lives (Duncan et al, 2010; Evans and Kim, 2013)
The results for the first research question comparing the levels of parental mindset and home-learning activities across countries are shown in the right column of Table 1
Our results show that there were no cross-cultural differences in the levels of ability mindset [t(494) = 1.54, p = 0.125] or effort mindset [t(494) = 0.99, p = 0.323] between Denmark and the United States
Summary
The experiences we have in early childhood profoundly shape the rest of our lives (Duncan et al, 2010; Evans and Kim, 2013). These two cultural contexts differ significantly in terms of societal inequality, availability of social benefits, and the frequency of “dual earner” couples; we speculated that parental mindset and time investments with their children may vary across these distinct cultural contexts To our knowledge, this is the first cross-cultural investigation of how parents view their role in their children’s lives using a mindset lens, and results may help to inform future interventions designed to improve the developmental experiences of young children. Research consistently finds positive effects of parents’ involvement in their children’s schools, including actual engagement in school-based activities as well as ongoing communication with children’s teachers, and is positively associated with children’s short- and longer-term academic development (Dearing et al, 2008; Bono et al, 2016) For these four dimensions of the home-learning environment, we examined interrelations with parent mindset as measured across two dimensions, which we refer to as ability mindset and effort mindset. We investigated country as a moderator of the link between parental mindset and home-learning activities to test if these relations differ by culture
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