Parent–child communication and children’s understanding of extraordinary minds

Research on how children come to differentiate the fallible minds of humans from the infallible mind of God has typically emphasized either broad socio-cultural influences or alternatively the specific religious knowledge that children acquire. Drawing on a social-interactionist perspective, we seek to integrate these approaches by examining whether this differentiation is supported by bidirectional parent–child communication: notably, parents’ initiation of and responsiveness to conversations about God, together with children’s own spontaneous comments on God’s extraordinary powers. We used two theory-of-mind tasks to probe the ability of Polish children ( N = 60, aged 4–6 years; 51.7% girls) to differentiate ordinary human agents from agents with exceptional mental capacities. We also assessed family communication about religion, parental religiosity, and children’s knowledge of God. The findings show that parent–child communication about God and children’s spontaneous references to God’s special capacities independently predicted their representation of God as having an infallible mind. These results suggest that children’s understanding of God’s extraordinary mind develops not only through exposure to a religious environment, but through an interactive process in which religious ideas are communicated by parents, taken up by children, and productively expressed in children’s own speech.