Achievement 209those stereotypes into their beliefs about their
individual daughters and sons.
Parents’ stereotypes also lead them to
make different attributions for girls’ and boys’
success in different subject areas. Parents are
more likely to attribute boys’ success in math
to talent (an internal, stable attribution) and
girls’ success in math to effort (an internal,
unstable attribution; Räty et al., 2002). Parents
also believe that talent is more important than
effort for success in math, which would imply
that boys should be more successful at math
than girls. Parents attribute math failure to
lack of effort for both boys and girls, no doubt
to preserve a positive image of their children.
However, mothers are more likely to attribute
girls’ failure to the task being too difficult. In
summary, parents appear to be less confident
about their girls’ than their boys’ math abilities.
Another way that parents communicate
their perceptions of a child’s ability is by how
they provide help. Helping a child with home-
work might seem as if it demonstrates parent
support. However, it also has the potential to
demonstrate to the child that the parent be-
lieves the childneedshelp—that is, it can com-
municate that the child lacks competence in
an area. In a study of middle school children,
parents who held stereotypes that girls were
not as good in math as boys were more likely
to intrude on girls’ homework, and these were
the girls who perceived that they had less math
ability (Bhanot & Jovanovic, 2005). In another
study, parent help with schoolwork was cat-
egorized as either “autonomy-granting” (e.g.,
emphasizing mastery of content over per-
formance, communicating to children that
they can do it on their own) or “controlling”
(e.g., rewarding children for schoolwork,
emphasizing that performance standards
are important, communicating that children
are not capable of solving problems on their
own; Pomerantz & Ruble, 1998). Parents were
found to use both autonomy-facilitating andhave opinions about the subject areas in which
it is important for boys and girls to excel. Spe-
cifically, parents rate girls’ math ability as lower
than that of boys and believe math is more
difficult for girls than for boys—despite equal
performance by girls and boys in math during
elementary school (Herbert & Stipek, 2005).
Parents believe girls are more competent in
English and boys are more competent in sports
(Pomerantz, Ng, & Wang, 2004). Parents also
believe that math and athletics are less impor-
tant for girls than for boys and that English is
less important for boys than girls. Parents’ gen-
eral sex stereotypes influence their beliefs about
their children’s areas of competence. For exam-
ple, parents who believe girls are better at read-
ing and boys are better at math perceive that
their daughter has higher reading ability and
their son has higher math ability—even when
the children’s objective performance on exams
is the same (Tenenbaum & Leaper, 2003).
Rather than assume a bias on the part
of parents, is it possible their beliefs about
their daughters’ and sons’ different abilities
are accurate? It is difficult to assess whether
one person has more inherent ability than an-
other. If a sex difference appears on an objec-
tive indicator of performance, does this mean
one sex has greater natural talent than the
other? Not necessarily. Boys and girls may
have had different experiences, which led to
different performances. For example, women
and men may have equal abilities in math,
but different experiences provided by teach-
ers, parents, relatives, and peers may lead
boys to outperform girls. Even when more
objective indicators of performance are taken
into consideration (e.g., test scores, teachers’
ratings of students, grades), parents still hold
sex-differentiated beliefs about their chil-
dren’s abilities that exceed any observed dif-
ferences in performance. It also turns out that
parents who hold stronger stereotypes about
women and men are more likely to translateM06_HELG0185_04_SE_C06.indd 209 6/21/11 8:10 AM