Honey, I shrunk the kids

Do we grow or shrink the mindsets of our children?

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

A friend asked me last week if there was a link between Imposter Phenomenon and parenting, and specifically the concept of parentification. If you’ve not heard of parentification it’s a term used to describe the role reversal that takes place between a child and a caregiver, and there are several reasons why this might happen over short or prolonged periods of time including financial hardship and pandemics.  

I thought it was an interesting question because we do not think there is an exact cause of Imposter Phenomenon, instead we think that the three features of imposter 1. intellectual fraudulence or self-doubt 2. fear of being exposed as fraud and 3. attributing to success to external factors such as luck, charm, and error could be a combination of personality, life experiences, and as my own research suggests, environment and systemic bias. The biggest issue I have with Imposter phenomenon is that it’s talked about as an ‘individuals’ problem, there are thousands of self-help guides published by magazines aimed at women, and this is in part what inspired me to research what sits around the feeling of fraudulence, so I’m really interested in research that looks at the environments that shape us from an early age. 

One of the first studies to look at this did find that imposter was ‘in part’ a consequence of long term parentification, but a more recent review of the research highlights that parental variables are less predictive of impostor than other measures like self-esteem. We can say that parentification is sometimes involved, but it's not a single predictor. Parentification is complex too, it can have positive and negative consequences that can co-exist, like an intelligent child with poor emotional control, and we see this in the results where parentification is positively related to school achievement and resiliency.  

One thing that us psychologists are clearer about though is the link between a growth mindset and Imposter phenomenon, psychologist Carol Dweck coined the growth mindset phrase when she saw differences between children who had fixed ‘I can’t do this’ vs growth ‘I can do this’ mindset in classrooms. You can listen to Carol taking about this here. The power of believing that you can improve | Carol Dweck 

As a parent myself I’m reassured that my parenting isn’t the only predictor of Imposter Phenomenon, and it’s good to know that telling children about how the brain works is one of the best ways to develop a growth mindset. Simply letting a child know that their brain creates new connections and rewires itself as we learn is at the core of most growth mindset interventions and creating an environment that promotes a growth mindset and learning, alongside the safety to fail is thought to reduce the reduce fear of failure that is synonymous with Imposter Phenomenon.  

I’m interested in what you think though, does imposter phenomenon have single or multiple causes, can we blame it on the parents? And do you see evidence of fixed or growth mindsets in your own children?