Savvy investments or formative endowments? Disentangling causal direction in the association between parental support and self-efficacy in STEM university students.

Conventional wisdom views the parent-child relationship as unilateral: Parents' actions upstream flow downstream to shape their children's development. However, scholars have proposed that this view of parenting is lopsided; children may influence their parents no less than parents influence children. We apply this bilateral perspective in a reexamination of the robust finding that confident people report having had more supportive parents.