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It’s OK to Fail: Individual and Dyadic Regulatory Antecedents of Mastery Motivation in Preschool

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Abstract

Mastery motivation is closely related to children’s regulatory processes and is socialized by parents. However, we know little about how individual child and dyadic parent-child regulatory processes work together to foster the early development of mastery motivation in preschool. The present study examined dyadic persistence in parent-child interactions, children’s effortful control, and children’s successful vs. failed attempts in a challenging object mastery task at age 3.5 years and their prediction of teacher ratings of object-oriented and social mastery motivation in preschool at a 4-month follow-up (N = 100). Path analytic models revealed that greater dyadic persistence during parent-child interactions predicted children’s higher levels of social mastery. A greater rate of both successful and failed attempts at a challenging task predicted children’s higher levels of object mastery. However, failed attempts were positively related to concurrent individual and dyadic regulatory measures, whereas successful attempts were not. Findings suggest that parent-child coregulation makes a significant contribution to mastery motivation development and that there may be distinct antecedents for object-oriented vs. social forms of mastery motivation. Findings also suggest that a child’s early ability to persist in the face of failure may be an important predictor of mastery motivation in preschool.

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Acknowledgements

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under grant number K01HD068170. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Erika Lunkenheimer

  2. Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, 140 Moore Building, University Park, PA, 16801, USA

    Erika Lunkenheimer

  3. Tufts University, 419 Boston Ave, Medford, MA, 02155, USA

    Jun Wang

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  1. Erika Lunkenheimer
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Correspondence to Erika Lunkenheimer.

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This manuscript was prepared in accord with the ethical standards of the American Psychological Association and the National Institutes of Health.

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There were no conflicts of interest involved in producing this manuscript or in submitting to the Journal of Child and Family Studies.

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This research involved human subjects, not animal subjects, and all aspects of the study were approved by the Research Integrity and Compliance Review Office at the university at which the research was conducted.

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Adult research participants completed a written informed consent procedure regarding their participation in the study and preschool children completed a verbal assent procedure.

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Lunkenheimer, E., Wang, J. It’s OK to Fail: Individual and Dyadic Regulatory Antecedents of Mastery Motivation in Preschool. J Child Fam Stud 26, 1481–1490 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-016-0633-0

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