Promoting Children's Cognitive and Social Competence: The Relation between Parents'Perceptions of Task Difficulty and Children's Perceived and Actual Competence

Abstract

LADD, GARY W., and PRICE, JOSEPH M. Promoting Children's Cognitive and Social Competence: The Relation between Parents' Perceptions of Task Difficulty and Children's Perceived and Actual Competence. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1986, 57, 446-460. The purpose of this study was threefold: (1) to assess the degree of difficulty parents attribute to specific socialization tasks, such as promoting children's cognitive and social competence; (2) to explore the relation between parents' perceived difficulty for these tasks and children's perceived and actual competence in the corresponding skill domains; and (3) to determine whether the degree of perceived difficulty reported by parents for cognitive and social child-rearing tasks varies as a function of the consistency between children's competence-oriented perceptions and actual achievements in these respective domains. 114 thirdthrough fifth-grade children (ages 8-11) were administered measures of perceived and actual competence (cognitive and social), and their parents completed a scale designed to assess the relative ease or difficulty associated with both cognitive and social child-rearing tasks. Preliminary analyses of the parent perception measure indicated sufficient reliability and factorial validity to warrant its use. In general, results indicated a stronger relation between parents' perceived difficulty and measures of children's actual as opposed to perceived competence, although the strength of the relation between these measures also varied depending on the skill domain assessed and the child's sex. Parents of children who scored high on both perceived and actual competence tended to report lower levels of perceived difficulty for corresponding socialization tasks than did parents of children whose scores on both measures were either low or mismatched (e.g., high perceived but low actual competence).