Family Involvement Laboratory (FIL)

Parental Cognition Project: Roles, Motivations, Costs and Benefits

Parents’ cognitions and behaviors play a central role in children's development. Although decades of research have identified parenting behaviors that promote positive child outcomes, considerably less attention has been devoted to understanding how parents' cognitions shape children's development. Parents' beliefs, perceptions, and motivations are important because they influence the decisions they make, the ways they interact with their children, and the family environments they create. Moreover, much of the existing literature has focused primarily on mothers from Western, White, socioeconomically advantaged populations, despite growing recognition that fathers make unique and important contributions to child development (Volling & Cabrera, 2025). Advancing developmental science, therefore, requires greater attention to both mothers' and fathers' cognitions across diverse cultural and socioeconomic contexts. This project draws on data from the BB2 Wave 4 assessment, when children were approximately 18 months old. We aim to understand how parental cognitions (understandings of parenting roles, motivations to be a good parent, perceptions of cost and benefit to be a good parent) may influence their parenting behaviors and children development.

Compliance Project: What Strategies do Parents Use to Get Children Comply

The ability to comply with parental requests (e.g., put away the toys) begins to emerge by the end of the first year and increases substantially between ages two and three. Such compliant behaviors reflect children’s emerging capacity to regulate their behaviors (e.g., stop playing and put away toys) and internalize social rules (e.g., comply with parents’ requests), which are foundational for later learning and school success. Although most children can comply with simple requests by age 3, there is considerable variability. One major source of this variation is parents because they exert strong influence on children’s development. To obtain children’s compliance, parents use a range of strategies (e.g., command, reasoning, praise) that reflect parents’ expectations that children can internalize their requests and ultimately behave in socially acceptable ways. However, relatively little is known about the strategies used by ethnically and socioeconomically diverse families, especially fathers, who may hold different expectations, values, and beliefs about how and when in development children should exhibit compliance. To address this gap we examine the strategies socially and ethnically diverse parents use to help their toddlers comply with their requests.