Inexperienced versus experienced mothers’ and preschool teachers’ strategies for providing persuasive messages to young children

This chapter compares the message strategies of parents and preschool teachers for persuading young children and reveals the effect of parenting and teaching experience on strategies adopted. The authors asked 454 mothers and 181 preschool teachers to select one of two framed messages to enhance children’s self-regulation ability. The results showed that, compared with no difference in message selection between inexperienced mothers and inexperienced preschool teachers, the strategy of experienced teachers shifted to a more positively-framed approach, whereas that of experienced mothers shifted to a more negatively-framed approach. The contrasting results in message strategy that changed with the parenting/teaching experience support the self-regulatory theory, in which caregivers develop children’s self-regulation ability through regulatory focus messages. This has implications for the development of parenting and teaching styles.