Self-Control in School-Age Children

Abstract

Conflicts between immediately rewarding activities and more enduringly valued goals abound in the lives of school-age children. Such conflicts call upon children to exercise self-control, a competence that depends in part on the mastery of metacognitive, prospective strategies. The process model of self-control organizes these strategies into five families corresponding to sequential phases in the process by which undesired and desired impulses lose or gather force over time. Situation selection and situation modification strategies involve choosing or changing physical or social circumstances. Attentional deployment and cognitive change strategies involve altering whether and how objective features of the situation are mentally represented. Finally, response modulation strategies involve the direct suppression or enhancement of impulses. The process model of self-control predicts that strategies deployed earlier in the process of impulse generation and regulation generally will be more effective than those deployed later. Implications of this self-control perspective for school-age children are considered.

Notes

¹ Note, however, that adolescents often behave more impulsively than slightly younger children. Why this is so, despite generally improving self-control competence, has remained a mystery until very recently. It is now known that during adolescence there is a dramatic increase in sensitivity to rewards and, in particular, to the thrill of risky, dangerous, rule-breaking behavior (Steinberg, 2007; Steinberg et al., 2009). Thus, although the capacity to regulate attentional, emotional, and behavioral impulses seems to improve steadily with age, certain impulses are especially strong during adolescence—and it is the combination of these two developmental trends that produces the spike in impulsive behavior.