Parental Bias, Parent-Child Discussion, and Children’s Eyewitness Reports

Parent-child discussions can scaffold children’s memory development. However, few studies have investigated parent-child discussions when caregivers have been misled (biased) to fear their children experienced a negative event. This study investigated the effects of bias on parents’ reminiscing style and children’s report of a staged event. Three- to six-year-old children (N = 77) experienced a target play session with two experimenters during which nothing stressful happened. Parent-child dyads were then randomly assigned to one of three discussion groups: biased discussion, non-biased discussion, or irrelevant discussion. After the parent-child discussion, children were asked to report information regarding the play session. Results revealed significant associations among parental bias and parent-child conversational style. Parents in the biased condition engaged in significantly more suggestive techniques during their target conversations, but these differences did not lead to a significant increase in false information in children’s individual report for the event. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.