My child and I: self- and child-reference effects among parents with self-worth contingent on children’s performance

ABSTRACT

Research shows that parents’ self-worth may be contingent on their children’s performance, with implications for their interactions with children. This study examined whether such child-based worth is manifested in parents’ recognition memory. Parents of school-age children in China (N = 527) reported on their child-based worth and completed a recognition memory task involving evaluative trait adjectives encoded in three conditions: self-reference, child-reference, and semantic processing. The more parents had child-based worth, the more they exhibited a child-reference effect – superior recognition memory of evaluative trait adjectives encoded with reference to the child rather than semantically. Parents exhibited the classic self-reference effect in comparisons of recognition memory between the self-reference and semantic processing conditions, but this effect was not evidenced among parents high in child-based worth. Only parents low in child-based worth exhibited the self-reference effect in comparisons between the self-reference and child-reference conditions. Findings suggest that when parents hinge their self-worth on children’s performance, evaluative information related to children may be an elaborate structure in memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Contingent self-worth
• Parenting
• Recognition memory
• Achievement
• Self-reference effect

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.3886/E179261V3.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the parents who participated in this research and the schools that assisted us with recruitment. We thank Jie Sui for sharing her list of Chinese adjectives with us. We also thank Chi-Shing Tse for his advice on the selection of the additional tasks used in this study.

Data availability statement

The data and syntax for analyses are available at openICPSR (https://doi.org/10.3886/E179261V3).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.