What parenting style is characteristic of fathers whose children have illusion of incompetence?

The general objective of this study was to examine the illusion of incompetence phenomenon in students from elementary school. Specifically, it was devoted to examine whether or not children's illusion of incompetence is related to other components of their motivational system and to school achievement. It was also intended to provide some information on parents' behaviors and reactions related to their child's performance.

It is generally acknowledged that accuracy of children's perceptions of competence or efficacy increases with age (Nicholls, 1979). However, most authors agree that it is from Grade 3 onwards that a significant relationship between perceptions and achievement can be observed Assor & Connell, 1992, Bouffard et al., 1998, Bouffard & Vezeau, 1998. Younger children tend to overestimate their competence. According to certain authors (Ruble, Grosouvsky, Frey, & Cohen, 1992), children are inclined to perceive themselves as being very competent because they do not yet clearly distinguish their desires from reality. Stipek and MacIver (1989) suggest that during the preschool period, children are often praised for their participation in an activity, for their effort, or their good behavior. In accordance with Nicholls, 1979, Nicholls, 1984, these authors suggest that young children tend to fell competent when they succeed a task following hard work or good behavior because they do not distinguish among notions of effort, skills, and behavior. Frey and Ruble (1987) observed that whereas children in kindergarten were more likely to compliment than to criticize them, the number of self-negative comments increased as students move through the school levels, as did their sense of assessment of their competencies. It is worth noting, however, that despite the increase in self-criticism, these authors have observed that the average child at Grade 4 continued to express two times as many positive comments as negative ones.

With the development of students' cognitive abilities and the increasing frequency of tests and grading of their achievements at school, children develop the ability to compare themselves to others and to consider a variety of factors to justify their performances. This is a view held by certain authors Bouffard et al., 1998, Harter, 1985a, Stipek & MacIver, 1989 who believe that the integration of all the information that is needed to evaluate one's competencies is a difficult task, requiring a certain level of intellectual skills. In this respect, Bouffard et al. (1998) have showed that accurate evaluation of one's abilities appeared earlier in children with a high intellectual potential than in children who are less intellectual gifted. In this study conducted on normal children who were classified in three groups according to their intellectual level (high, average, or low), the authors have showed that in Grades 3 and 4, perceptions of competence were only clearly linked to achievement in students from the group judged to have above-average abilities. It is only from Grade 5 that such a relationship was observed in the group with average or below-average intellectual abilities.

In short, as observed in our Western societies at least, elementary school children's assessment of their abilities is generally marked by a positive rather than a negative bias. As a crucial dimension of motivation, perceptions of competence are inner resources that, when positive, foster the investment of efforts that are needed to learn (for a review, see Eccles, Wigfield, & Schiefele, 1998). However, as demonstrated by Phillips, 1984, Phillips, 1987, certain students are less optimistic than others and tend to underrate their competencies, thus manifesting what she has called an illusion of incompetence.

Therefore, despite the potential that is reflected in their standardized test scores, some children have expectations of achievement that are lower than others with the same potential but who have higher perceptions of competence or efficacy Phillips, 1984, Phillips, 1987. They prefer work that is not very challenging (Harter, 1985a); they consider themselves less curious and able to make effort, less interested in and more easily bored with school subjects; they are more likely to attribute their success to luck, effort, or to the help that they received rather than to their abilities; they are more anxious during tests (Phillips & Zimmerman, 1990); and are less persistent and independent than children with a positive opinion of their abilities (Phillips, 1987). Lacking the motivation that comes with positive perceptions of themselves, their performance tends to fall below the potential that they are able to achieve. According to Phillips (1984), these children will lack the resources to pursue studies that call for high levels of effort and perseverance. Illusion of incompetence has been associated to fraudulence perception, which is experienced by certain highly productive adults who tend to be self-critical and who discredit their achievements, who are very concerned with the image they project, and who manifest high levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms (Kolligian, 1990).

Interestingly enough, excluding the above work by Phillips with gifted children and that of Harter with a normative sample, only few empirical studies have documented the factors that may be linked to illusion of incompetence. A greater number of researchers have been interested in the associated phenomena of underachievement Borkowski & Thorpe, 1994, McCall et al., 2000, Richert, 1991, Smith et al., 1978, Van Boxtel & Mönks, 1992 and learned helplessness Dweck et al., 1980, Heyman et al., 1992, Licht & Dweck, 1984. It appears essential here to distinguish these phenomena from the illusion of incompetence.

As stated by McCall (1994) and McCall et al. (2000), underachievement basically refers to students who achieve clearly lower results than what their abilities would lead one to expect; whereas learned helplessness refers to their reaction when faced with a difficult situation or following failure. Since such students believe that external factors are in control of the situation and that their efforts are useless, they tend to become discouraged more quickly and to abandon an activity rather than to persevere Dweck et al., 1980, Hokoda & Fincham, 1995. Finally, the illusion of incompetence concerns students who perceive that their abilities are lower than what is actually reflected by mental ability tests Phillips, 1984, Phillips, 1987. If learned helplessness is a characteristic that is often associated to the illusion of incompetence and that eventually effects underachievement, the opposite is not necessarily the case: Learned helplessness and underachievement do not necessarily involve or result from the illusion of incompetence. Learned helplessness can indeed be caused by an individual's faulty evaluation of the actions to be taken and the efforts needed to achieve success, while underachievement can be due to a variety of factors such as a lack of interest or value attached to an activity, an attention deficit disorder, etc. In other words, learned helplessness and underachievement are two constructs representing a person's reactions when confronted with a particular challenge, whereas illusion of incompetence is a cognitive distortion in a person's judgment of their abilities.

The studies of Phillips, 1984, Phillips, 1987 dealt mainly with selected samples comprised of gifted students. As these were students with superior intellectual abilities, it would be hard to maintain that their problem of illusion of incompetence be due to a cognitive deficit that renders them unable of correctly processing information. Therefore, it is possible that certain characteristics of their immediate environment play a role in the evolution of this phenomenon. As we assume that an adequate social environment is conducive to the development of positive perceptions of competence, we can also posit that a social environment that is less favorable should have an effect in the development of negative perceptions of competence.

According to Harter (1999), parents' appraisal of their child has a great influence on the development of the latter's perceptions their abilities. From the first year of school, children's perceptions of competence are linked to their interpretation of their parents' assessment of their school abilities (Bordeleau & Bouffard, 1999). Many authors agree that children's perceptions of competence are strongly bound to the perceptions, expectations, and requirements of parents concerning their school achievement Alexander & Entwistle, 1988, Eccles Parsons et al., 1982, Frome & Eccles, 1998, Halle et al., 1997, Jacobs & Eccles, 1992, McGrath & Repetti, 1995, Phillips, 1987, Stevenson & Newman, 1986. Moreover, some researchers reported that the relation between personal's perceptions of the appraisals of parents and self-appraisals is stronger than is the relation between actual appraisals of parents and self-appraisal Bordeleau, 2000, Felson, 1993.

In a study on parents of students in Grade 3 having achieved superior school results, Phillips (1987) examined if parents' perceptions of their child and their children's beliefs of those perceptions significantly distinguished children with different perceptions of competence. She observed that the students with the lowest assessment of their competence were those who reported feeling a lack of positive judgment and also a lot of pressure from their parents to achieve high marks. Moreover, the mothers of these children considered them less capable of working independently while their fathers judged them to be less persistent in their efforts.

In another study, Wagner and Phillips (1992) attempted to determine if parents' behaviors varied depending on whether their child presented a problem of illusion of incompetence or not. Parents and children were observed while they worked together in a problem-solving situation. The parental dimensions that were examined included the pressure exerted on children in order to achieve the task, affective reactions, and directive behaviors. The authors did not find any difference in these dimensions between mothers of children with an illusion of incompetence problem and those without. A lower level of affective reactions was, however, observed in fathers of children presenting an illusion of incompetence, but the difference was only marginally significant.

Studies identifying parental characteristics associated to the development of illusion of incompetence in children are few and far between. Also, as they focused exclusively on samples of gifted students, it is unclear how their conclusions are associated to the selective nature of the test samples and can be applied to students with average intellectual abilities. McCall et al. (2000) recently raised a similar problem in regard to studies on school underachievement. No matter their level of ability, all students can be affected by an illusion of incompetence, and there is no theoretical argument to posit that the effects of this phenomenon should differ according to level of ability Harter, 1985a, Harter, 1999.

The general objective of the current study is to extend conclusions of previous studies with gifted children to a normative sample of children. This was achieved by examining a set of variables among children and their parents that were found to characterize gifted children with an illusion of incompetence. Two specific objectives are pursued. The first examines how children affected by an illusion of incompetence compare to others regarding their intrinsic motivation, the efforts they report, the pride they take in their achievements, the competence they believe that their parents ascribe to them, and their school achievement. The second objective examines how their parents compare to others with regard to the attention that they give to their child and the supervision that they exercise over them, the perception of their child's competence and motivation, as well as the pride and satisfaction in their child's school achievement. Since the sample comprised boys and girls from Grades 3 and 5, this allowed us to consider gender and school level as factors in examining the objectives.

Participants

One hundred and thirty-three children at Grade 3 (63 boys and 70 girls, mean age=9 years 3 months, S.D.=5.4 months) and 166 children at Grade 5 (74 boys and 92 girls; mean age=11 years 2 months, S.D.=5.1 months) were recruited from 10 different public schools in the Montreal area. All children were French speaking. In order to participate, either the child's father or mother had to agree to fill out various assessments about themselves and about their child. Among parents, 22 fathers and 111

Children classification

In order to examine the objectives of this study, children were classified into one of three groups (optimist, realist, or pessimist) whether their self-perceptions of competence were higher, similar, or lower than the ability they exhibited as indicated by their scores on the test of mental ability. Accordingly, the pessimist group comprised those children having an illusion of incompetence. In order to reduce the arbitrary nature of the classification, two different methods were used

Discussion

The general objective of this study was to examine the illusion of incompetence phenomenon among students in elementary school by verifying how those affected by this phenomenon compare to others regarding different dimensions of their motivational system and achievement and how their parents compare to others regarding their behaviors and reactions to their child's functioning. It is worth recalling that research into this phenomenon is not documented by many empirical studies. Except the

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (government of Canada) and the Fonds FCAR (government of Quebec). The authors thank the principals, teachers, students, and parents for their participation. They also thank anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on a previous version of this paper.

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