Article critique on Leonard et al. (2021)
This article contributes to the general body of evidence of research on child development.
Specifically, psychological development. In this study, the researchers aimed to isolate factors
which affect a child's ability to persist through difficult challenges. Difficult challenges
consistently emerge throughout all walks of life. Individuals who are better at working hard in
order to overcome these challenges (AKA persist) are more likely to achieve their goals, thus
having a better quality of life. One of the overall goals of this research is to understand factors
which affect this quality in individuals. With adequate research, parents can use this information
to alter their parenting strategies in order to increase their child's persistence.
Before this study was conducted, not much was known about strategies which would
increase persistence in young children. However, other studies have shown that positive
parenting (i.e. encouraging learning in a supportive manner) has shown to have a positive effect
on the development of young children. It was theorized that this parenting strategy could
potentially lead to an increase in persistence in young children. In addition, experimental work
has shown that the actions of adults can also affect persistence in young children. The authors of
this paper hypothesized that using the positive parenting strategy would increase a child's overall
persistence and vice versa.
This paper used data from 1 observational study and 2 experiments. In the observational
study, there were 34 participants ages 4-8. 150 participants ages 4-5 were used in the
experimental studies.
Observational study:
In this study, participants were collected via advertisements in public settings (i.e. public
transportation, local schools, social media, etc.). One issue I found with this is a lack of diversity
in participants. In general, a more diverse sample would produce more significant results. This
study excluded non-English speakers, however it did have a great diversity in ethnicities and
economic status. Personally, I would have the experimenter be able to conduct this study in
multiple languages.
The parental subjects were given these written instructions: “See how many of these
puzzles your child can make”. This also had a 5 minute time limit. The experimenters observed
the parents comments, and determined whether they were using the positive or negative
parenting strategy. It is also important to note that the subjects were aware that they were being
recorded on video, which could potentially affect their parental-child interaction. If I ran this
study, I would record them secretly (with approval from an ethical committee). At the end, the
parents rated their children's persistence with the task.
The overall goal of this study was “to test for correlations between children’s persistence
and parenting behaviors and for correlations among parenting behaviors”. The children with
lower persistence scores tended to have parents that provided more help with the puzzles, which
slightly differs from the original hypothesis.
Experimental study 1:
N = 90
These experiments were conducted to see the effect of parents taking over on one challenging
task had on their children's persistence on a following task. Children were recruited from an
urban children's museum and randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions (described below). One
large flaw, which I would alter, is the lack of diversity. The participants all shared similar
qualities which lead them to that said location.
This experiment had 3 conditions described as this: a taking over condition where the
experimenter stepped in to help solve the first puzzle, a teaching condition where the
experimenter attempted to help the participant solve the puzzle, and a control condition where
the child received no help. The independent variable is the help of the experimenter. Next, the
children were given an impossible puzzle and were timed to see long until they gave up. The
time spent attempting to open the box was the dependent variable. This is how the researchers
quantified persistence (more time spent = more persistent the child is) Throughout each
experiment, the experimenter would repeat lines to ensure similar conditions.
Children in the “taking over conditions” were shown to have a shorter persistence time
relative to the control and “teaching group” and there was no significant difference between the
control and “teaching group”
Experimental study 2: (slight variation in experiment 1)
N = 60 (I would have a total of 90 participants in order to make this study more consistent with
experiment 1)
This experiment was set up the same way as experiment 1 except it tested the effect adults
taking over has on their child's motivation. They did this by having the experimenter pretend that
it was his turn to play the game. It was hypothesized that this approach would increase
persistence. Children in all 3 conditions were shown to spend a longer amount of time on the
impossible puzzle, but not significantly.
Conclusion of these studies as a whole:
Parents taking over a task which their children are struggling with generally results in a decrease
in their child's persistence. This slightly differs from the authors original hypothesis based on the
positive parenting model.
Personal reflection:
Although there were a few things in the experimental design which I would change (noted
above), I found the data backing up the authors claims to be sound, detailed, and compelling.
Each study did a good job of limiting extraneous variables and did a good job of explaining all
factors. This is the first time I have ever read a research article from a psychology journal, and I
learned that scientific writing does not have to be 100% robotic. I should note that I had trouble
understanding all of the nuances in the portions of statistical analyses.