Children who feel their parents are less reliable take fewer risks essential to their learning and growth, study finds

Trying something new is a risk every child takes as they explore and learn about the world. Although the risk can be costly, it can also pay off in terms of rewards or knowledge. But new research suggests that children without the predictable support of adults in their lives are less willing to take these risks and reap the rewards.

“If you’re in a resource-rich environment, meaning for a child you’re safe, your meals are coming, someone’s home for you, you’re surrounded by adults that protect you, you’re going to try new things,” says Seth Pollak, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies childhood adversity. “And this is how we discover and learn about the world.”

But not all explorations will be rewarding, and according to a new study on childhood exploration and parental predictability that Pollak and colleagues published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scienceschildren who do not believe they have the support of reliable parents are less willing to risk the unknown.

“What’s invisible around that corner could be valuable, but you could also find yourself in bad situations,” says Pollak. “You might end up ordering a bad meal or touching something that hurts. You might end up in a bad relationship or with an empty wallet. And so, we thought, to have the confidence to try something new Again, you should feel supported and relatively safe, like you can afford to make a bad decision.”

Researchers studied the decisions made by more than 150 children ages 10 to 13 while playing games designed by C. Shawn Green, a psychology professor at UW-Madison. The games offered children the opportunity to take a little risk and explore potential gains.

One game, modeled after two casino slot machines, gave players a history of payouts on just one of the machines, information that helped them understand expected winnings if they continued to pull that machine’s handle. The history of the other machine was a mystery, and investing there was riskier, but also potentially a greater return on investment.

The other game, in which children picked apples from virtual orchards, had diminishing returns as players continued to pick from an individual tree. With limited time, would players move to new trees, with unknown bounties? Or would they attack the tree they knew best?

Children and their parents also participated in a battery of surveys and assessments. The researchers assessed the stress children experience and the predictability of their lives – based on factors such as parental job loss, divorce, death or illness in the family and changing schools and of home – as well as the children’s opinion on whether their parents or not. were reliable and predictable.

Yuyan Xu, a UW-Madison graduate student and first author of the study, asked children to answer questions about how they experienced their relationships, such as: When my parents say they will search, can I count? on them for being there? When my parents make a promise, do they keep it? Do I generally know how my parents will react to different types of situations?

The less reliable and predictable children felt their parents were, the less likely they were to take exploratory risks in the games they played. They were less likely to give the mysterious slot machine a chance or choose to move to another apple tree.

“Kids from more stable backgrounds play and experiment with our games. They use that to get a feel for how things work, which perhaps allows them to earn more money or more points,” says Pollak. “Children from unstable backgrounds simply don’t play that way. They stay within a narrower range of possibilities. They prefer to stick with what they already know, even if it’s limited, rather than try their luck to get a higher reward.”

The researchers found that these self-imposed risk limits were not related to more objective measures of stress and unpredictability in children’s lives, or even to parent reports that did not necessarily match their children’s perceptions. on their relationships. There was no correlation between lack of risk-taking and levels of anxiety or neuroticism, or children’s feelings about the rest of the world outside their family. If they felt their parents were unreliable and unpredictable, they were less willing to explore.

“I think it makes sense,” Pollak says. “Their brains do exactly what we want our brains to do, right? If you truly feel that things are unpredictable and you don’t know how things will turn out, you will stick to what works and what is familiar to you. Don’t waste your resources on something that might collapse.

The researchers first conducted their experiments with a group of nearly 80 children, then repeated them with a second group of just over 80 additional children to confirm their results.

“What’s interesting here is that there seems to be a way in which our early childhood experiences calibrate how we decide to make these decisions years and years later and in really different types of situations “, explains Xu.

Openness to exploration would not be the only important aspect of childhood reinforced by stability. Language development, sleep quality, stress regulation, and other research topics in childhood development are linked to the predictability of children’s lives. Pollak plans to delve deeper into the relationship between predictability and exploration to see how the divides might be bridged.

“What can we do for children who view their interpersonal relationship history as unstable? ” he says. “We may not be able to change relationships the moment we understand that they are unpredictable. But could we change the way children perceive them, the way they act accordingly? If it is flexible, we will be able to perhaps adapting these children to the benefits and rewards of exploration to promote children’s learning.