Promoting curiosity during free play: Relations between parent-child interactions and infants’ novelty exploration

Environmental factors, including parents, play an important role in promoting children’s curiosity. Though curiosity is rooted in infancy, little is known about how parent-child interactions affect infants’ curiosity. The current study investigated the different ways parents promote curiosity through their infants’ exploration of a novel toy. We observed parent–child interactions between 39 parent-infant dyads in a semi-structured naturalistic 10-minute free play session. During the last 5 minutes of the session, parents were tasked with introducing a novel toy (i.e. a knotted foam curler) to the session, with no further instructions. Parent exploration-promoting and infant-exploratory behaviors during those 5 minutes were coded using a newly developed coding scheme, “Parental roles in Infant Curiosity through Exploration” (PICE). Findings revealed that when infants explored the novel toy, parents were more likely to observe rather than promote the exploration. However, when parents did promote the novel toy, infants were more likely to explore it if parents used explicit verbal cues. The study's focus on exploration-promoting verbal and nonverbal behaviors enables researchers to identify specific parenting behaviors that may have a significant impact on infant development and in turn, help develop interventions to support parents in fostering their children's curiosity and promoting early learning.