Mothers who believe they can shape their destinies give children a head start in life.

By Jamie Doward

The Observer, Sunday 17 August 2014


Hundreds of thousands of teenagers will this week open their GCSE results and discover whether their years of studying have paid off. But their academic fortunes may owe nearly as much to the mindsets of their mothers as to the hours spent revising. Research published by the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) finds that babies born to mothers who hold a strong belief that their fates are in their hands, rather than down to luck, perform significantly better in their GCSEs 16 years later.

The conclusion, which gives pupils with low grades a novel excuse for their poor performance – "It's all your fault, Mum" – is based on analysing data drawn from the Children of the 90s project, a long-term study of the lives of more than 10,000 young people born in the Bristol area. The study tracks the formation of a key personality trait known as the "locus of control" – people's subjective belief in their ability to influence their life which is formed in infancy and stabilises in adulthood. Psychologists claim that people can be classified along a continuum on the locus of control scale.

At one extreme are people with a very internal locus who believe they can entirely direct the course of their own lives. At the other are people with a very external locus who believe their life is entirely determined by luck or fate and feel they have little power to change things. Most people are somewhere between these two extremes. Warn Lekfuangfu and Nele Warrinnier, two members of the CEP research team which analysed the data, said previous studies show that, compared with people who have a strong external locus of control, those who have a strong internal locus tend to invest more in their education, live a healthier lifestyle and search for a job more intensively when unemployed. "Our study simply offers new evidence that they also tend to make better parents as well," the academics claim.

Another member of the team, Dr Francesca Cornaglia, an economist from Queen Mary University of London, said the research clearly showed the influence of a mother's personality was substantial. "Holding other things constant – including family background, mother's education and children's own locus of control – we find that children whose mothers ranked in the top 25% of the internal locus of control scale tended to obtain total GCSE scores around 17% higher than children whose mothers ranked in the bottom 25%." Professor Nattavudh Powdthavee, a senior author of the study, said that mothers who have a higher perceived sense of control over their life early on tend to believe in a more hands-on approach to parenting. "This is simply because they strongly believe their actions will make a difference in their child's life," he said. "Consequently, they tend to engage their children in more cognitively stimulating activities such as reading and singing. This seems to have given their children a head start in terms of cognitive development."

[Interesting. I think my mother’s ‘locus of control’ was more external than internal. She did, and still does, have a habit of blaming other people for things that go wrong. Then again she always blames other people for their own mistakes too – which I guess could teach her kids (including me of course) that you are ultimately responsible for everything that happens to you! So I guess I have that to thank her for the belief that I am indeed the Captain of my own Fate. Thanks Mum.]