UC Santa Cruz

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.