| Sumario: | Process praise (i.e., praise for effort) facilitates childhood persistence. However, less is known about the mechanism by which process praise influences persistence in infancy. Here, we propose that well-timed process praise reinforces the link between effort and success, thus promoting persistence in young children. In Experiment 1, U.S. infants aged 17–18 months old (N = 29; 13 females; M = 18 months, 3 days; 76% White) and in Experiment 2, Canadian toddlers aged 17–31 months old (N = 60; 34 females; M = 22 months, 17 days; 40% White) participated with caregivers. Across experiments, caregiver process and general praise overlapping temporally with both trying and success related to greater persistence during a dyadic task, while praise offered only during trying or success was not. However, the effects of temporally aligned process praise were more robust than the effects of general praise. Furthermore, process praise which did not correspond to children's actions (i.e., high-volume or randomly dispersed process praise) negatively related to persistence. Thus, these findings demonstrate that young children are responsive to temporal alignment in praise and further suggest that temporal alignment especially in process praise may help form the basis for later mindset models. Public Significance Statement: The way caregivers talk to children helps them persist more on challenging problems. Here, we saw that when caregivers timed their praise to highlight moments when their infants' trying turned into success, infants kept trying for longer both in the laboratory and in their own homes. This timing might help infants begin to develop a positive mindset toward persistence which will be increasingly important as they grow.
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