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Children's beliefs about the contribution of effort and ability to success and failure shape their decisions to persist or give up on challenging tasks, with consequences for their academic success. But how do children learn about the concept of "challenge"? Prior work has shown that parents' verbal responses to success and failure shape children's motivational beliefs. In this study, we explore another type of talk--parent and child talk about difficulty--which could contribute to children's motivational beliefs. We performed secondary analyses of two observational studies of parent-child interactions in the United States (Boston and Philadelphia) from age 3 to fourth grade (Study 1, 51% girls, 65.5% White, at least 43.2% below Federal poverty line) and at first grade (Study 2, 54% girls, 72% White, family income-to-needs ratio M [SD] = 4.41 [2.95]) to identify talk about difficulty, characterize the content of those statements, and assess whether task context, child and parent gender, child age, and other parent motivational talk were associated with the quantity of child and parent difficulty talk. We found that many families did discuss difficulty, with variation among families. Parents and children tended to use general statements to talk about difficulty (e.g., "That was hard!"), and task context affected child and parent difficulty talk. In the NICHD-SECCYD dataset, mothers' highlighting how task features contributed to task difficulty was positively correlated with their process praise, suggesting that this talk could be motivationally relevant.

The ability to reason about our own and others’ competenceinforms our everyday decisions. However, competence is anabstract concept which manifests in the objective properties ofthe task completed by an agent (i.e., task-based features, suchas quality of outcome or task difficulty) as well as the sub-jective properties of the agent (i.e., agent-based features, suchas dexterity, speed, focus). Thus, acquiring an integrated no-tion of competence may be a nontrivial challenge for youngchildren. Prior work on children’s understanding of compe-tence has often used explicit verbal cues to describe the rele-vant features, or experimental tasks that confounded these fea-tures. Here we examine how preschool-aged children evalu-ate the relative competence of two agents by systematicallymanipulating task-based and agent-based features without ex-plicit linguistic or gestural support. We find that 4- and 5-year-olds readily use perceptual cues to task-based (i.e., taskdifficulty) and agent-based (i.e., agent speed) features to in-fer competence (Exp.1-3) but not when when these perceptualcues are closely matched (Exp.4). These results suggest thata basic understanding of relative competence emerges earlierthan previously believed, but an abstract, adult-like concept ofcompetence may continue to develop throughout childhood.

The ability to reason about task difficulty is critical for manyreal-world decisions. Building on prior work on preschoolers’inferences about the difficulty of novel physical tasks (Gweonet al., 2017), here we ask whether this ability further supportsrational allocation of effort in collaborative and individual con-texts. When an agent could offer help to someone who had tocomplete a hard task versus someone who had to complete aneasy task, adults and preschoolers offered help with the hardertask (Collaborative Goal). When an agent could choose tocomplete a hard task or an easy task to achieve the same out-come, adults and preschoolers preferentially chose the easiertask (Individual Goal). In the absence of explicit informationabout the relative difficulty of tasks, even young children in-ferred the expected difficulty of tasks and appropriately allo-cated effort across agents and across tasks. Beyond expectingagents to choose actions that maximize their own utility in in-dividual contexts, our results show that even preschool-agedchildren readily understand how deviating from this choice canbe desirable in cooperative contexts.

The ability to reason about the difficulty of novel tasks is criti-cal for many real-world decisions. To decide whether to tacklea task or how to divide labor across people, we must estimatethe difficulty of the goal in the absence of prior experience.Here we examine adults’ and preschoolers’ inferences aboutthe difficulty of simple block-building tasks. Exp.1 first estab-lished that building time is a useful proxy for difficulty. Exp.2asked participants to view the initial and final states of variousblock-building tasks and judge their relative difficulty. Whileadults were near-ceiling on all trials, children showed varyinglevels of performance depending on the nature of the dimen-sions that varied across structures. Exp. 3 replicated the pat-tern. These results suggest that children can reverse-engineerthe process of goal-directed actions to infer the relative diffi-culty of novel tasks, although their ability to incorporate morenuanced factors may continue to develop.