Verbal persuasion and resilience of parenting self-efficacy: Preliminary findings of an experimental approach

Verbal persuasion may be the least preferable way to enhance parenting self-efficacy as it may undermine resilience against failures inevitable in parenting. To test this, 55 parents participated in two tasks. First, a cry interpretation task led a random half of the participants to believe they mastered this skill and would do well on the subsequent task, while the other half was told their skill was low. In the second task parents chose appropriate responses to stop infant crying which exposed them to randomly assigned success rates (20%, 40%, 50%, or 80%). Parenting self-efficacy was rated before and after the second task. Results showed that positive persuasion led to higher parenting self-efficacy than negative persuasion. Crucially, parents who received positive persuasion were vulnerable to decreases in self-efficacy due to failure. These findings are a preliminary suggestion that verbal persuasion may heighten parenting self-efficacy in the short-term, but undermine its long-term resilience.