Children with unreliable parents take less learning and growth risks

Every youngster, as they explore and learn about the world, takes a risk by trying something new. While risk might be expensive, it can also pay out in terms of rewards or knowledge. However, new research reveals that children who lack dependable adult support are less inclined to take those risks—and gain the rewards.

“If you’re in a resource-rich environment—meaning for a child that you’re safe, your meals are coming, someone is at home for you, you’re surrounded by adults that are protecting you—you’ll try new things,” says Seth Pollak, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor of psychology who studies childhood adversity. “And that’s how you discover and learn about the world.”

However, not every exploration will be rewarding, and according to a new study of childhood exploration and parental predictability published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Pollak and colleagues, children who do not believe they have the support of reliable parents are less willing to risk the unknown.

“What’s unseen around that corner could be golden, but you could also end up in some bad situations,” Pollak said. “You might order a bad meal or touch something that hurts you.” You may find yourself in a poor relationship or with an empty wallet. So, we reasoned, in order to have the courage to attempt something new, you need to feel supported and relatively safe—as if you can afford to make a wrong decision.”

The researchers examined decisions made by more than 150 youngsters aged 10 to 13 while playing games devised by C. Shawn Green, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The activities allowed the children to take small risks in search of prospective rewards.

One game, modeled like a pair of casino slot machines, provided players with a history of payouts on only one of the machines, which helped them comprehend their predicted wins if they continued to pull the machine’s handle. The second machine’s past was unknown, and investing a pull there was more risky, but also potentially more profitable.

The other game, in which children collected apples in virtual orchards, showed declining benefits as players picked from a single tree. Would the gamers, given limited time, go to new branches with unknown bounties? Or would they stick to the tree they knew best?

A battery of surveys and assessments were also administered to the children and their parents. The researchers assessed the stress and predictability of the children’s lives based on factors such as parental job loss, divorce, death or illness in the family, and changing schools and homes, as well as the children’s own perceptions of whether or not their parents were reliable and predictable.

Yuyan Xu, a UW-Madison graduate student and the study’s first author, asked children to answer questions on how they’ve experienced their relationships, such as: Can I trust on my parents to pick me up when they say they’ll? Do my parents follow through on promises they make? Do I usually predict how my parents will behave in certain situations?

The less dependable and predictable the youngsters perceived their parents to be, the less likely they were to take experimental risks in their games. They were less likely to try the strange slot machine or go to a different apple tree.

“Children from more stable homes play around and experiment in our games.” “They use it to get a sense of how things work, possibly earning them more money or points,” Pollak explains. “Kids from troubled homes just don’t play that way.” They limit themselves to a smaller set of options. They would rather stick with what they know, even if it is limited, than risk a bigger potential return.”

The researchers discovered that those self-imposed risk limits were unrelated to more objective measures of stress and unpredictability in the children’s lives, or even to parental accounts that did not always coincide with their children’s impressions of their relationships. There was no link found between a lack of risk-taking and anxiety or neuroses, or the youngsters’ feelings about the world beyond their home. They were less ready to explore if they believed their parents were untrustworthy and unpredictable.

“I think it makes sense,” says Pollak. “Their brains are doing exactly what our brains want them to do, right?” If you truly believe that things are unpredictable and that you have no idea how things will turn out, you will stick to what works and what is known. You wouldn’t squander your money on something that could go wrong.”

The researchers conducted their trials with a group of roughly 80 children first, then with a second group of slightly more than 80 children to corroborate their findings.

“The interesting thing here is that there seems to be a way in which our early childhood experiences are calibrating how we decide to make these decisions years and years down the line and in these really different kinds of situations,” Xu said.

Stability would improve more than just openness to discovery during childhood. Predictability in children’s life has been linked to language development, sleep quality, stress regulation, and other themes of childhood development study. Pollak intends to dig deeper into the relationship between predictability and exploration in order to determine how rifts can be bridged.

“What can we do for kids who view their history of interpersonal relationships as unstable?” he asked. “We may be unable to change the relationships by the time we realize they are unpredictable.” Could we, however, influence how children see and respond to them? If that is adaptable, perhaps we can educate those children on the benefits and pleasures of exploration in order to promote children’s learning.”

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