Optimism in Parental Predictions of Children's Future Behaviour

One important aspect of parents' beliefs about their children's development is that they may be biased towards optimism (Goodnow, Cashmore, Cotton, and Knight, 1984). To test this, 74 parents were asked to judge whether their 5-year-old children would increase or decrease on each of 10 personal qualities from the time of the written interview until the age of 15. Qualities could be rated positively or negatively; parents also rated the qualities' prevalence in girls or boys. Parents expected increases over age in the "male" quality of liking competition, the "female" quality of being able to sit still, and the neutral qualities of independence and self-confidence, while they expected decreases with age for the male quality of being sloppy and the female quality of being easily upset by mistakes. Thus there was no evidence that gender-appropriateness of a factor would override its positiveness. There were no significant gender effects; parents appeared to be optimistic about their child's future qualities, whether they were judging a daughter or son.