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Primary school plays a crucial role in children’s lives. During this educational stage, they experience important developmental milestones, shaping their confidence and ability to accomplish tasks and master new skills. The way children approach challenging learning tasks — whether with concentration, effort, and determination or a tendency to give up — can significantly impact their success during this stage. Therefore, understanding how to enhance children’s persistence with difficult tasks is essential for fostering their positive development.

Yet, the learning process takes place in a social context. For primary-age children, teachers at school and parents at home play a crucial role in supporting them with challenging tasks. Thus, in her dissertation, Justina Davolyte explores the role of teacher and parent support in fostering children’s task persistence, as well as how children’s task persistence, in turn, influences the support they receive from teachers and parents. Her study focuses on Lithuanian children in Grades 1–3.

Study I focused on the qualities of close and conflictual teacher-child and parent-child relationships as components of support. The results showed that a conflictual relationship between a teacher and a child can have a negative role on child’s task persistence in Grade 1. However, a close relationship with both parents and teachers can strengthen children’s task persistence. Additionally, higher task persistence in children may play a role in fostering closer relationships with teachers.

Study II focused on teachers’ and parents’ frequency of help with tasks and their positive affect while helping. Results showed that both teachers’ and parents’ joy and satisfaction while providing help, but not the help frequency itself is important in enhancing children’s task persistence during Grade 2. However, teachers and parents tend to offer more frequent help if children demonstrate lower persistence.

Study III examined different subgroups of teachers and parents based on the frequency of help, their positive affect while helping, and the degree of autonomy they provided. The results identified four distinct teacher-parent academic support subgroups. However, most of the variation among these subgroups was observed in teachers, particularly in their levels of joy and satisfaction while helping students. Notably, 37.5% (n = 231) of the children who belonged to the most positive subgroup—characterized by especially high teacher joy and satisfaction—showed increased task persistence from Grade 2 to Grade 3

Overall, these results are important and novel because they simultaneously consider both teachers’ and parents’ support. Together, the findings suggest that the affective components of support—such as a close relationship or the joy and satisfaction while helping—rather than the frequency of help, play a crucial role in fostering children’s task persistence in primary school

The dissertation is based on ”Get involved! Transition to grade 1” and ”Get involved! Learning in primary school” studies which were funded by the Academy of Finland. Justina Davolyte was funded by the Department of Psychology of the Ģ��ֱ��.