Encountering challenges and experiencing failure are commonplace in the course of learning and development. Young children with similar abilities and motivations, however, may respond in different ways to task difficulty and failure. For example, they may display a helpless response to failure and give up, or, they may respond with mastery-oriented behaviors such as maintaining or even increasing effort. Research has shown that the provision of praise, when focused on process (e.g., effort) and use of non-generic labels (e.g., labeling one specific instance), promotes mastery-oriented responses to failure. Whereas praise that focuses on person characteristics (e.g., "You're smart") and the use of generic labels (e.g., labeling of an individual or group) may lead to helpless responses to failure. Praise occurs within a social context and the quality of the parent-child relationship may also influence the effects of this feedback. Prior research, however, has not examined how the quality of a child's attachment security to his or her parent may serve as a moderating factor between parental praise and young children's responses to failure. Prior research has also neglected to consider whether suggestions of considering alternative strategies (e.g. "maybe it is possible to think of more unusual, original ideas"), in addition to process praise, strengthens or weakens mastery-oriented responses to failure. This is important to consider because the consideration of alternative strategies may promote a sense of control. The study examined the relation between maternal praise and children's responses to failure in relation to suggestions of considering alternative strategies and children's attachment insecurity. Participants consisted of fifty 4-5 year old children and their mothers. Survey data were collected from the fifty mothers to assess the kinds of praise and strategy feedback they used at home, to measure their perception of the child's attachment to the mother, and to assess the child's responses to failure. In addition, a within-subjects quasi-experimental design exposed the fifty children, in random order, to two different praise conditions (i.e., process praise, process praise plus the suggestion to consider alternative strategies) and measured their responses to failure scenarios using puppets. Results from both the quasi-experimental design study as well as from the survey data revealed that different types of praise (i.e. person, process, process plus the suggestion to consider alternative strategies) were not significantly related to young children's responses to failure. Perceptions of attachment insecurity and gender did not moderate the relationship between the type of praise used and the young children's responses to failure. Perceptions of attachment insecurity and of negative affect were significantly related to young children's responses to failure. The within-subjects design did not reveal any clear predictors of young children's responses to failure scenarios using puppets; however the correlational design showed that the more insecure the child's reported attachment, the more negative the child's reported response to failure. Similarly, the more negative the child's reported affect, the more negative the child's reported response to failure.
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