Parental Ethnotheories about Children’s Information-Seeking: Examining Children’s Questions and Parents’ Responses

Using a sequential mixed-methods design, we developed the Parental Ethnotheory Scenarios, a contextualized measure of parents’ beliefs about children’s questions. Autonomy-supportive beliefs were linked to more fact-seeking questions and parents’ elaborative responses, whereas beliefs emphasizing compliance were associated with more concise parental responses, highlighting how ethnotheories relate to children’s information-seeking.