There is important variation in how elaborative parents from different cultural backgrounds are with their children during narratives (Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 2006; Schick & Melzi, 2010). The present study built on this work by examining whether mothers from three cultural communities varied in the content of their elaborations when in two storytelling contexts: parents sharing their own personal experiences, and narratives elicited using a wordless book, The Lion and the Mouse (Pinkney, 2009). Sixty families: 40 US parents of Mexican descent from two schooling levels, and 20 European Heritage parents shared narratives about the parent and a wordless book at home. Parents’ academic elaborations (print knowledge, labeling, generics, and physical causality) and life lesson elaborations (causal motivation, causal motivation implicit, personal connection, and consejos) were coded. In the personal storytelling context, European heritage mothers shared more personal connections than Mexican Heritage mothers from both groups. In the wordless book context, Mexican Heritage mothers in the basic schooling group shared more causal motivation talk than European Heritage mothers and Mexican Heritage mothers from the higher schooling group, whereas European Heritage mothers shared more print knowledge talk than the other two groups of Mexican mothers. This study advances practical understandings of how the content of elaborations children are exposed to at home varies across contexts in these communities.

How do children learn about possibility? About what is physically impossible versus what is merely improbable or unexpected and could occur under the right imagined circumstances? Recent developmental research shows younger children to frequently be more skeptical than older children about unusual events. I provide evidence that parents' explanations are an even larger predictor of the variation found in children's possibility thinking than children's age. Building on a prior study, the current study found variations in the frequencies of 62 parents' speculative, skeptical and requesting explanations during a picture book discussion with their 5-to-8-year-old child. These differences in parental talk were related to parent's artistic, scientific and other vocations. Importantly, differences in parental explanations predicted children's own judgments that improbable events could be possible in real life. Parents with `scientific' vocations requested more explanations from their children than parents with `artistic' or `other' vocations. Additionally, both parents with scientific and parents with artistic vocations gave more speculative explanations than parents with other vocations. Importantly, parents' tendencies to be speculative, skeptical, or requesting were related to children's thinking about possibility and to their use of more sophisticated mechanistic justifications for their possibility judgments. The discussion focuses on why some differences in explanations among vocations might have been found, and why talk is an important predictor for differences in children's thinking. Future directions look to a deeper examination of the reciprocal nature of parent-child conversations, the notion of habitual talk patterns as real individual differences related to everyday practice, and the need for more research on creative communication genres such as practicing possibilities as they relate to understanding of fantasy, reality, and the boundaries in between.

What do mothers and children believe about whether parents are in charge of what and how much a child should eat? The current study explored children's beliefs about the scope of parental authority over food decisions and whether these beliefs depend on features of the situation. Additionally, relations between children's and their mothers' beliefs were explored. Mothers and their 5- or 7-year-old children were interviewed separately regarding 4 different types of hypothetical food-related disagreements where a mother requested her child to: eat healthy foods, eat unhealthy foods, eat foods equally healthy to what the child wanted, and eat more or less than the amount the child desired. Mothers were also interviewed about actual family disagreements about food and strategies for dealing with them. Results showed that in healthy scenarios mothers and children viewed what children ate as the mothers' decision; however, in all other scenarios mothers viewed what to eat as the child's choice. Children were more likely to see what children ate as up to the parent, only reliably categorizing the unhealthy scenario as the child's choice. Exploring individual differences showed the proportion of mothers' rule-like strategies for real-life food conflicts were correlated with children's authority-based answers. Mothers' political position also predicted children's authority orientation toward food decisions, with children of conservative parents more likely to focus on authority.

The goals of my dissertation are first to gain a better understanding of the variety and breadth of a set of environmental practices that I call canny consumption practices, and second to provide empirical evidence that canny practices are part of Indigenous-descent families' daily activities and their connections to Indigenous principles which consider all living entities—human and non-human—to be persons and part of one body. Twenty Indigenous-descent mothers or fathers from rural and urban communities of Guatemala were interviewed together with their pre-teen or teenage children. Parents’ responses to the semi-structured interviews showed that canny practices are indeed part of Guatemalan Indigenous-descent families’ daily lives and that these cultural practices are aligned with Indigenous Worldview principles. These findings are important for research that focuses on Indigenous-descent communities, particularly in the developmental field, because they bring a culturally relevant lens to explore the development of Indigenous-descent children’s environmental concepts.

Children often discuss science and nature topics in their everyday conversations with their parents; however, these conversations are not always scientifically accurate. Some researchers argue that these scientifically incorrect conversations interfere with children’s learning by reinforcing children’s misconceptions (Shtulman, 2017). Others argue that factually incorrect conversations may still support children’s learning by giving them opportunities to discuss science in meaningful and contextually relevant ways (Hammer, 1996). This study explores how parents view and approach science misconceptions, comparing high-stakes topics like health and safety versus low-stakes general science topics. I also consider how parents’ reported and observed approaches to science misconceptions might vary with child age, parents’ attitude towards science or failure mindset, and parent or child gender. Parent-child dyads (N = 107) participated in this study (55 girls, 52 boys, M = 63.09 months, SD = 10.41 months, Range: 48-83 months; 69 mothers, 38 fathers). Parents discussed their views about science misconceptions in a brief interview, and reported they respond to misconceptions by (1) correcting, (2) scaffolding, or (3) exploring their children’s science misconceptions. Parents most often reported an approach to misconceptions that was in line with a goal to correct their children’s science misconceptions. More positive views of failure predicted a greater likelihood of parents reporting a scaffolding compared to a correcting or exploring approach. In a prompted conversation activity, parents were observed approaching misconceptions by (a) providing the correct answer, (b) scaffolding, (c) mixed (scaffolding / correct answer), or (d) exploring. Parents were more likely to correct children’s misconceptions about health and safety than general science topics. Parents’ observed approaches to misconceptions also varied based on their mindset about failure and their gender. Their reported approach and observed approaches were generally aligned. Parent talk during the conversation activity was also coded at the utterance level for accuracy talk; fathers used more frequent accuracy talk than mothers, but there was no difference in the proportion of accuracy talk for mothers and fathers. Altogether the present study illuminates how parents and children engage with misconceptions and provides new insights into better understanding children’s science learning in real-world contexts.

This research brief describes some preliminary findings from the CREDE research project, "At-Risk Preschoolers' Questions and Explanations: Science in Action at Home and in the Classroom," conducted in collaboration with the Family Science project of Life Lab Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Life Lab Science also collaborates with another CREDE project called LASERS (Language Acquisition through Science Education for Rural Schools). Together, these three projects conducted a set of Family Science workshops that comprise the focus of this research brief.