Shaping adolescents’ mindsets: the role of peers and parents

The overall goal of the studies in this dissertation was to get a better understanding of the role of the social context, specifically peers and parents, in the development and situational adjustment of the mindset of adolescents. Chapter 2 explored, through a cross-sectional social network study, whether friendship networks and cooperation partner networks within school classes differ from one another. Additionally, I examined whether adolescents' friends and cooperation partners share similar mindsets. The study included 558 Dutch adolescents from 26 different classes from two schools in the southern part of the Netherlands. For the first research question, I conducted an analysis of peer nominations using the Quadratic Assignment Procedure. From the data, I distinguished three unique networks: a friendship only network, a combined friends and cooperation partners network and a cooperation only network. No evidence for similarity in mindset was found within the three different networks. However, I did find that adolescents with a growth mindset selected more peers to cooperate with than adolescents with a fixed mindset. This latter finding suggests that mindset plays a role in shaping social interactions between adolescents within the context of cooperation. Chapter 3 included both a cross-sectional and a diary study. In the cross-sectional part, I examined the direct and indirect relation between parental beliefs, specifically their mindset and failure beliefs, and how parents appraised school achievements, and their adolescents’ mindset. In the diary study, I investigated how parents’ daily feedback was associated with day-to-day fluctuations in adolescents’ mindset. The findings, from a sample of 129 Dutch adolescents and their parents, revealed a more growth oriented mindset in parents related to a more growth-oriented mindset in their adolescents as well. Furthermore, parents’ result-oriented day-to-day feedback negatively associated with adolescents’ mindset, which demonstrates that a focus on school marks may inhibit the development of a growth mindset in adolescents. Chapter 4 aims to, driven by two motivational theories, examined how mindset, feelings of school burnout and the three basic psychological needs of the self-determination theory, specifically self-efficacy (competence), autonomy support (autonomy) and relatedness (relation), predicted changes in autonomous motivation during the challenging circumstances of the COVID-19 home schooling period. Regression analyses on a sample of 76 Dutch adolescents and their parents revealed that endorsing a growth-oriented mindset was positively related to autonomous motivation of adolescents during the school closures of the COVID-19 pandemic, while feelings of school burnout were negatively associated with autonomous motivation of adolescents. Additionally, parental perceived autonomy support was associated with more autonomous motivation of adolescents during the COVID-19 period of home-based learning. Chapter 5 aimed to investigate how neuroscience information affects views and behaviours of parents when raising their adolescents. I first focused on beliefs in neuromyths and neuroscience literacy (knowledge about the brain) of parents. Furthermore, I investigated potential consequences of these beliefs in neuromyths. Therefore, I considered parents’ views on adolescent brain development and how these views are related to their belief in neuromyths and their neuroscience literacy. Additionally, I examined the communication from parents to their adolescents by asking them whether and how they think they may have changed their parenting behaviours based on neuroscientific information.The results form a digital survey on a sample of 153 Dutch parents of adolescents, revealed that parents believed 44.7% of the neuromyths and showed reasonable neuroscience literacy (79.8%). Additionally, the results demonstrate that a stronger belief in neuromyths predicted a more negative view on adolescent brain development. Furthermore, about 68% of parents of adolescents reported that they changed their parenting behaviours based on their understanding of neuroscientific findings. These self-reported changes most often reflected changes in parents’ own behaviour.