What is it about?
Trying something new is a risk every child undertakes as they explore and learn about the world. While risk can be costly, it can also pay off in rewards or knowledge. But new research suggests children without predictable support from the adults in their lives are less willing to take those risks -- and reap those rewards. The researchers gauged the stress the children experience and the predictability of their lives — based on factors like parental job loss, divorce, death or illness in the family, and changing schools and homes — as well as children’s own views about whether or not their parents were reliable and predictable. The less reliable and predictable the kids felt their parents were, the less likely they were to take exploratory risks in the games they played.
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Why is it important?
This study shows that the stability of our early childhood experiences is calibrating how we interact with and learn from the world years down the line in really different kinds of decision-making situations.
Perspectives
What can we do for kids who view their history of interpersonal relationships as unstable? We might not be able to change the relationships by the time we understand them to be unpredictable. But we may change the way kids think about them and how they act on them to help foster kids' learning and exploration.
Yuyan Xu
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Childhood unpredictability and the development of exploration, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2303869120.
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