The impact of parents' implicit theories of intelligence on young children's approaches to learning: The serial-mediating roles of children's achievement motivations and goal orientations

While prior research has indicated a link between children's implicit theories of intelligence (i.e., beliefs about the malleability of intelligence or abilities) and their learning behaviors, it remains unclear whether this association expands across generations. This study explored the impact of parents' incremental theories of intelligence on preschooler' approaches to learning (characterized by competence motivation, attention/persistence and attitude toward learning) and analyzed the inner influencing mechanism from a perspective of motivations. The data was collected through online questionnaire surveys, involving a total of 402 Chinese parents of children aged 3 to 6. The results showed that children whose parents held stronger incremental theories had better approaches to learning. Moreover, children's achievement motivations and goal orientations served as serial mediators in this relationship. Specifically, parental incremental theories were correlated with children's lower fear of failure and greater hope for success. Children's hope for success was positively associated with their learning goal orientation and performance goal orientation. In contrast, children's fear of failure was positively related to their performance goal orientation but negatively to their learning goal orientation. Ultimately, children's learning goal orientation was positively linked to their competence motivation, attention/persistence and attitude toward learning, while children's performance goal orientation was detrimental to their competence motivation and attitude toward learning but conducive to their attention/persistence. The findings provide important evidence for the spillover effect of pedagogical agents' implicit theories and expand the evidence in the field of preschoolers' approaches to learning.