Parental Messages and Child Confidence

Abstract

This paper studies how parents influence the ego-relevant information children receive about themselves and how this shapes children’s beliefs and behavior. Using a field experiment with 7th-grade Norwegian students and their parents, we show that parents provide their children with messages that are systematically more positive than their private beliefs. Children incorporate these positively biased messages into their self-assessments. The gap between parents’ private beliefs and their communicated messages is larger when the message is received before the child works on a task, suggesting that the desire to motivate the child is one mechanism behind the positive message bias. The study contributes to understanding how the inter-personal transmission of self-relevant information, rather than solely intra-personal cognitive biases, shapes overconfidence. Joint paper with Michela Carlana, Marlis Schneider, Oda Sund.