The Child's Awareness of Parental Beliefs concerning the Child: A Developmental Study

ALESSANDRI, STEVEN M., and WOZNIAK, ROBERT H. The Child's Awareness of Parental Beliefs concerning the Child: A Developmental Study. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1987, 58, 316-323. This study investigated adolescents' and preadolescents' awareness of the beliefs that parents hold regarding them by examining patterns of agreement between parents and between parents and children concerning the children's likely behavior in a variety of situations. 24 2-parent, middle-class families with a 10-11-year-old and 24 with a 15-16-year-old were separately interviewed in 2 sessions scheduled a week apart. Interviews were based on the Family Belief Interview Schedule (FBIS), which presents 15 short vignettes designed to assess parental beliefs about the child and, with slight modification, the child's beliefs about parental beliefs. Findings indicated that: (1) families varied widely in intrafamilial agreement; (2) adolescents were more accurate in predicting parental beliefs than were preadolescents; (3) preadolescents were more likely than adolescents to assume that their parents were similar to one another in their child perceptions; (4) fathers' beliefs were more congruent with the self-beliefs of adolescents than of preadolescents. These findings are interpreted within a social cognitive and family-systems framework.