Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Parenting practices are known to play an important role inshaping children’s outcomes. For example, children whoseparents engage them in high-quality conversations and whoare given opportunities for free play are at an advantage forlearning and later academic outcomes. However, communicat-ing the results of relevant scientific findings to parents remainsa challenge. One possible moderator of uptake of parentinginformation is the implicit theories parents hold with regardto child development and parenting. As a first step in inves-tigating this possibility, the present work establishes a newmeasure of parenting attitudes including three subscales cor-responding to attitudes about rules and respect, affection andattachment, and early learning. We then examine whether sub-scale scores predict uptake of new information about children’slearning. Scores on the Early Learning subscale, but not theRules and Respect subscale, predicted generalization from thearticle, providing initial evidence of the validity of this mea-sure.