Research Focus

Mixed messages are detrimental to children

When solving problems, one key decision children must make is whether to persist on the task at hand. Persistence can be aversive, requiring repeated failure and sacrifice of time and energy. However, persistence is also frequently necessary to learn and succeed, so children must come to appreciate its value. While abundant work has demonstrated that focusing on children’s effort encourages positive mindsets and greater persistence, I have elaborated how effort-based encouragement can backfire in the context of mixed messages. For example, that process praise that does not temporally correspond to infants’ actions relates to decreased persistence, and that effort-reward inconsistencies relate to lower trying in older children.

Children divest from teaching containing mixed messages

Given that children are sensitive to and influenced by mixed messages, what do they do when they receive mixed messages? I have investigated children’s adaptations to mixed messages in pedagogical contexts in which children receive instruction that is later inconsistent with their own experiences. When taught solutions are ineffective, it would be adaptive for children to divest from adults’ teaching and prioritize their own firsthand experiences, not just for the benefit of their own learning but also because innovation is critical for social progress. Fortunately, even infants can use just their firsthand exploration to detect and divest from mixed messages. Importantly, children’s exploration in the context of mixed messages is adaptive, relating to greater success and learning in older children and persistence in younger children. As such, my work illustrates that children’s divestment from mixed messages is influenced by cost-benefit analyses, similar to what I have demonstrated in other domains.

How do social categories and power dynamics influence children's reactions to mixed messages?

Individual differences in identity and social power could change the way children interface with mixed messages. As a starting point, my work has elaborated that children are aware of these differing expectations. For instance, demonstrating that both adults and older children expect greater conformity from poor children rather than rich children, and children and adults hold inconsistent expectations for how girls and boys will expend effort. However, my work goes beyond studying the content of sociocultural expectations to understand the consequences for children's firsthand actions. Thus far, my work has utilized gender as a lens to interrogate individual differences in coping with mixed messages. While boys are often given more power and encouragement to display independence and exploration, girls are more likely to be encouraged to display obedience and prioritize others' emotions. As such, when exposed to mixed messages, girls feel more pressure to persist in adult messages than boys do. Thus, the ways children resolve mixed messages are not identical: while some children feel more power to deviate from ineffective teaching, other children feel more pressure to persist in ineffective teaching. These findings underscore the importance of social identity in the study of children’s engagement with mixed messages.