The Role of Parents in How Children Approach Achievement: A Dynamic Process Perspective

Abstract

Aims to provide an integrated account of parents' role in children's approach to achievement--that is, what Elliot and Dweck (2005) term "competence-relevant motivation," and Eccles, Wigfield, and Schiefele (1998) term the "motivation to succeed." To this end, we highlight how parents and children jointly contribute to children's approach to achievement over the course of development, emphasizing the power of social contextual forces. Achievement is particularly salient in the school context, where children spend a large portion of their day in activities aimed at developing their academic competencies. As a consequence, most of the research on the role of parents in how children approach achievement has been in the academic area. A central premise guiding this chapter is that parents enable children to approach achievement positively by aiding them in satisfying their psychological needs. Thus, in the first section, drawing from self-determination theory, we discuss the existence of such needs and their importance to children's orientation toward achievement. In the next section, we focus on how parents facilitate children's fulfillment of their psychological needs, thereby shaping the orientation children adopt toward achievement. We delineate three modalities through which parents contribute: behavioral (i.e., parents' practices), cognitive (parents' perceptions and expectancies), and affective (i.e., the sense of relatedness between parents and children). Subsequently, drawing on dynamic process perspectives of socialization, we make the case that parents' contribution to children's approach to achievement is embedded in an ongoing bidirectional socialization process between parents and children, which is influenced by social-contextual forces. In line with this perspective, in the third section, we outline how characteristics of children and the social context moderate parents' influence. In the fourth section, we discuss how characteristics of parents and children shape parents' ability to aid children in meeting their psychological needs. Given the theme of this book, in all the sections, we pay particular attention to matters of competence.