Abstract
This study examined parents’ implicit theories of intelligence and self-regulation from a person-centered perspective using latent profile analysis. First, we explored whether different belief profiles exist. Second, we examined if the emergent belief profiles (1) differ by demographic variables (e.g., age, education, child’s self-regulation) and (2) are related to parents’ failure beliefs, goal orientation (i.e., learning goals, performance-approach goals, performance-avoidance goals), and co-regulatory strategies (i.e., mastery-oriented and helpless-oriented strategies). Data were collected from N = 137 parents of preschoolers who answered an online survey comprising their implicit theories about the malleability and relevance of the domains (a) intelligence and (b) self-regulation. We identified three belief profiles: profile 1 (9% of the sample) displayed an entity theory, profile 2 (61% of the sample) showed a balanced pattern of both domains of implicit theories, and profile 3 (30% of the sample) was characterized by high incremental self-regulation theories. Analyses showed that parents differed significantly in education and their perception of child self-regulatory competence depending on profile membership, with parents in profile 1 having the lowest scores compared to parents of the other profiles. Differences in parents’ failure beliefs, goal orientation, and co-regulatory strategies were also found depending on profile membership. Parents in profile 3 reported failure-is-enhancing mindsets, and mastery-oriented strategies significantly more often than parents in profiles 1 and 2. The results provide new insights into the interplay of important domains of implicit theories, and their associations with parents’ failure beliefs, goal orientation, and co-regulatory strategies.
Highlights
Many parents have concrete beliefs about their children’s abilities
The importance of implicit theories is evident, relatively little is known about how different domains and dimensions of implicit theories co-occur in everyday situations affecting parents’ attitudes and co-regulatory strategies
Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC) and aBIC values were lowest for the five-profile solution, indicating that five profiles were optimal
Summary
Many parents have concrete beliefs about their children’s abilities. For example, parents may view their children’s abilities as malleable and changeable by effort or rather believe that their children have innate competencies that are relatively fixed and cannot be changed. The importance of implicit theories is evident, relatively little is known about how different domains (e.g., intelligence, self-regulation) and dimensions (e.g., malleability, relevance) of implicit theories co-occur in everyday situations affecting parents’ attitudes (e.g., failure beliefs, goal orientation) and co-regulatory strategies. This lack of attention to interaction processes of different domains is surprising, given that individuals can hold different implicit theories in different domains and attributes at the same time (Dweck et al, 1995; Tabernero and Wood, 1999; Muenks et al, 2015; Haimovitz and Dweck, 2017). Since parents play an important role in children’s self-regulatory development, parents’ implicit theories of self-regulation should play an important role in predicting self-regulatory processes
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