We have all met the parent who thinks their kid is the next Picasso or Einstein regardless of the evidence. But it’s hard to ascertain if these beliefs are helpful or harmful. Overly optimistic parents could reduce their children’s drive to work harder and give them a false idea of the opportunities available to them. Or this same optimism could fill the child with confidence, kindle their self-belief and encourage to try harder. We set out to discover which of these possibilities is most likely. We found a mother’s optimism about how good their child is in maths and reading consistently benefited children. In our study, when a mum’s optimism was higher, their child showed better school results and their interest in school subjects increased. But gender stereotypes could get in the way. Mums were consistently more optimistic about their sons in maths and daughters in reading. We know children from wealthy backgrounds usually have better academic results and numerous academic advantages over their peers. We may also think wealthier parents are generally more optimistic about their children’s success. But we found only modest and generally inconsistent evidence that mothers’ optimism was more likely among the wealthy. More importantly, our findings that optimism leads to better school outcomes and more academic interest was the same regardless of a mother’s socio-economic status. What we did Grumbling about how every child needs a participation trophy these days is a common refrain. Back in the “good old days”, some might say, kids got hard truths and parents spurred their children to greater heights by grudgingly giving praise and pessimistically assessing their child’s academic performance. We wanted to find out whether parents could benefit their children more by being more optimistic or by laying down hard truths. We used data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). This data comes from 2,602 Australian children and their primary caregiver. The primary caregiver in the data was almost always a mother, so we focused on them. But we think our results would be true for all parents and guardians. Included in the longitudinal study was an assessment by mothers about whether their child was below average, average or above average in reading and maths performance. We then matched the mother’s assessment of their child to the child’s NAPLAN results in the same year. This gave us insight into whether children’s grades in maths and reading actually were below average, average or above average. Where mums judged their child’s maths and reading performance more positively than school results suggested, we called this optimism. We called negative judgements pessimism. We used the resulting optimism or pessimism data from one year and showed how this impacted NAPLAN and academic interest two years later. So we’d look at the data for year 3 and how this changed in year 5, for example. Thus, we were able to show that mothers optimism and pessimism was associated with change in academic outcomes two years later. We also found, on average, mums…
