The serial mediation effect of parents’ metamemory repertoire and metacognitive talk on children’s associative memory

Recently, studies have revealed that parent–child interactions are one of the key drivers of children’s memory development. Here, we investigated whether some specific parental behaviors and characteristics—the richness of parents’ metamemory repertoire and their propensity to use metacognitive talk when interacting with their children—could mediate the well-known influence of parental education level on children’s memory performance. To do so, 54 parent–child dyads with children aged 24 to 46 months were recruited and tested at two time points. Parents’ metamemory repertoire was estimated using a questionnaire requiring the generation of as many different strategies as possible to solve various memory scenarios. The frequency of parents’ metacognitive comments during a standardized discussion about a past event with their children was used as a measure of metacognitive talk. An associative recognition memory task was used to assess children’s memory performance. Our results revealed that the effect of parental education level on children’s memory was serially mediated by children’s exposure to metacognitive talk via the richness of parents’ strategic memory repertoire. Specifically, parents with higher educational attainment were likely to nominate more memory strategies than parents with a lower level of education. In turn, having a rich metamemory repertoire increased the likelihood of being metacognitive when interacting with children, which has a positive effect on children’s memory performance. The importance of these findings for the sociocultural models of memory development is discussed.