Origins of children's helpless and mastery achievement patterns in the family.

An exploratory study examined the origins of childrens motivational patterns in the family by observing 3rd-grade children (10 helpless and 11 mastery-oriented) and their mothers performing a series of solvable and insolvable problem-solving tasks. Mothers of mastery children appeared to show sensitivity and responsiveness to their childrens ability percep-tions and requests for help. They also appeared to support mastery behaviors in their children by increasing task-focused teaching behaviors and maintaining high-positive affect during the insolvable puzzles. Furthermore, in the face of failures, they retrained their childrens low-ability attributions and performance-goal statements, while promoting mastery or task-focused behaviors. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that mothers of mastery children may socialize their childrens achievement motivation. However, because of the small sample size and other limitations, the results should be interpreted with caution. Several directions are outlined for future research on the familial origins of helpless and mastery patterns in children. Learned helplessness is an important individual differ-ence that affects childrens performance in achievement