Do mothers' perceptions of their children's intelligence affect children's cognition, literacy, and educational achievement?

One factor that contributes to children’s differences in school performance is their own beliefs about intelligence. These beliefs are likely informed by children’s early socialisation experiences, which vary across families and children. For example, some children may receive more frequent messages from their parents emphasizing their inherent intelligence or cleverness than others. Such differential reinforcement can contribute to shaping children's beliefs about their intelligence and, subsequently, impact their cognition, literacy, and educational achievement. This project aims to (a) review the empirical literature on the association between parents' perceptions of children's differences in intelligence, how parents express these perceptions in speech and communicate them to their children (e.g., in praise, criticism), and if there is a link between parents’ perceptions of children’s intelligence and children’s beliefs about their own intelligence. A follow-up project (b) will use secondary data analyses of E-Risk (https://eriskstudy.com/) to test in an original empirical study that uses twin difference models if mothers’ perceptions of their children’s intelligence children’s cognition, literacy, and educational achievement. Relevant papers Latham, R. M., & von Stumm, S. (2017). Mothers want extraversion over conscientiousness or intelligence for their children. Personality and Individual Differences, 119, 262–265. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.07.037 Brown, A., Caspi, A., Ph.D., Fisher, H. L., Moffitt, T., Wertz, J., Ph.D., & von Stumm, S. (2024). Mothers’ speech predicts children’s differences in cognition, literacy, and educational achievement across the school years. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/xk7h4