Top Stories - Posted by Andy Fell-UC Davis on Thursday, October 25, 2012 10:13 - 3 Comments 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Kids’ worries are bigger than parents think
The researchers found that parents consistently rated their children as being less worried and more optimistic than the children rated themselves. That there was a difference between adults and children in both ratings shows that there wasn't a simple effect of children giving themselves higher scores for everything, says study author Kristin Lagattuta. (Credit: iStockphoto)
UC DAVIS (US) — Parents overestimate their kids’ optimism and downplay their anxieties, researchers say.
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The findings suggest that secondhand evaluations by parents or other adults of children’s emotional well-being need to be treated with caution.
Many psychologists and researchers have long held that children under the age of seven cannot accurately report how they feel, says Kristin Lagattuta, associate professor of psychology at University of California, Davis, who led the study. So behavioral scientists frequently rely on the impressions of parents, teachers, and other adults.
However, several studies have shown that parents think their kids are smarter than they really are—for example, parents often overestimate how well their children will perform on math, language, or other cognitive tests.
“We thought this ‘positivity bias’ also might apply to how parents perceive their children’s emotional well-being,” Lagattuta says.
Lagattuta, with Liat Sayfan, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, and Christi Bamford, a former graduate student at UC Davis, made the discovery while conducting larger studies on individual differences in children’s social reasoning.
Rather than rely just on parent questionnaires, the researchers decided to assess kids’ views of their own emotions.
They developed a picture-based rating scale that children could use to rate how often they felt different kinds of emotions. The team got the children used to the scale with basic questions such as how often they eat a particular food or wear clothes of a particular color.
In three separate studies involving more than 500 children ages 4 through 11, they found that parents consistently rated their children as being less worried and more optimistic than the children rated themselves.
The questions involved common childhood anxieties such as being scared of the dark, or worries about something bad happening to a family member.
Lagattuta and her colleagues also found that parents’ own emotions biased not only how they perceived their children’s emotions, but also the degree of discrepancy between the parent and child reports.
The fact that there was a difference between adults and children in rating both anxiety and optimism showed that there wasn’t a simple effect of children giving themselves higher scores for everything, Lagattuta says.
Instead, children consistently provided higher ratings than parents when reporting their worries and lower ratings than parents when evaluating their feelings of optimism.
Previous research with parents suffering from anxiety or depression have shown that parents’ own emotions influence how they evaluate their children’s feelings, Lagattuta adds. The current findings show that this is a mainstream phenomenon not specific to adults with mood disorders.
The results do not invalidate previous work involving parent reports of children’s emotions, Lagattuta says. But they do show that secondhand evaluations by parents or other adults need to be treated with care. Ideally, researchers should get emotion reports of children from multiple sources, including the child, Lagattuta says.
Awareness of this parental positivity bias may also encourage adults to be more attuned to emotional difficulties children may be facing, she notes.
The research, supported by the National Science Foundation, appears in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
Source: UC Davis
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3 Comments
Karen
This is important information for parents to know. Children do worry a great deal, and they are not as optimistic about their lives as parents think. After I had 320 third grade children complete a short survey, I wrote a summary, “Helping Children Cope with Worries,” that may be of interest to readers. For a direct link, see: http://www.kellybear.com/TeacherArticles/TeacherTip6.html
In addition, when an adult and child read the Kelly Bear Feelings book together, the adult can discover much about their child’s fears, sadness, anger, etc. For sample pages, see: http://www.kellybear.com/MatBOOKS.html
Great article! I am curious if the researchers also obtained information as to why parents minimize children’s worries and if it relates to their additional life experience.
Judith Sills, in her (2004) book Excess Baggage, describes that when children’s worrying is accompanied by good outcome versus negative, this reinforces worrying. The central science of this seemingly contradictory logic is best explained, I believe, by Hebb’s Theory and the phrase “That which fires together wires together.” A child worries that his parent’s will argue upon their arrival home from work but they do not. The child’s brain then makes an false association between worrying and positive outcome. This encourages repetition of the same behavior, further reinforcing the false positive association.
It would be interesting to know if simple life experience serves to eventually put children’s large looming worries and false positive associations in more accurate perspective.
tend to see low correlation between parent and child report of internalizing (depression, anxiety, etc) and externalizing (conduct disorder, deliquent beh) symptoms, and suicide research is full of info about how parents don’t realize their suicial teen was depressed. there are a number of good self-report measures of emotions for children!