Process analyses of the behavior of very young children in delay tasks.

Abstract

In Kopp's model of self-regulation, 2-year-old children are consolidating cognitive advances, which enable them to elaborate a sense of self. These advances also enhance the capacity to control behavior in response to demands from the environment. With increasing age, advances in self-control capacity are expected, and these increases are accompanied by the use of behavioral "strategies" serving to help the child maintain self-control. In this article, two studies are presented that describe the behavior of very young children in tasks demanding self-control. In Study 1,27 2-year-olds were observed in one task. Behavior during the task was described using a 10-category coding system, and proportion scores derived from the 10-category coding system were correlated with total time in the task. Five of the 10 correlations were significant. Behaviors bringing the goal into attention were negatively correlated with total delay time, whereas behaviors taking the goal out of attention tended to be positively associated with delay. In Study 2, 82 children between the ages of 24 and 36 months were observed in three delay tasks. The behavioral strategy studied was "directing attention away" from the goal object during delay periods. Significant effects were found for age and task type. When the sample was divided into "shorter" versus "longer" waiters, we found that the longer waiters looked away from the goal for a larger proportion of the time (than did shorter waiters). These results suggest that very young children use implicit strategies for controlling their behavior in the face of a social demand.By 18 to 24 months of age, developmental changes are becoming consolidated, which enable children to construct and elaborate a sense of self. Advances in language capacity, mental representation, classification, and memory (e.g., Brown, 1973;DeLoache & Brown, 1984;Myers & Perlmutter, 1978;Sugarman, 1983) all enhance the child's emerging skills for controlling and regulating ongoing behavior so as to comply with demands from the social and physical environments. With increasing age, both the capacity for self-control and the consistency with which control is exercised are expected to increase (e.g., Vaughn, Kopp, & Krakow, 1984). Recently, Kopp

Mother‐Child Coregulation During Delay of Gratification at 30 Months

“…Work by Johnson and Kopp (1981), however, indicated at least a rudimentary understanding of the usefulness of distraction in toddlers, as 24-month-old, but not 18-month-old, children in a delay task directed a majority of their behaviors away from a forbidden item. Since this time, other studies have confirmed the finding that delay ability in preschool-age children is associated with attentional focus on stimuli other than the forbidden item (Cournoyer & Trudel, 1991;Vaughn, Kopp, Krakow, Johnson, & Schwartz, 1986).…”

“…Categories of regulatory behavior assessed were consistent with previous research highlighting specific verbal and behavioral strategies utilized during frustration tasks (i.e., Calkins & Johnson, 1998;Cournoyer & Trudel, 1991;Stifler & Braungart, 1995;Vaughn et al, 1984;Vaughn et al, 1986). For each 5-sec interval, the presence or absence of each of the following six child variables was assessed: orient to toy, orient to other, orient to mother, self-comforting, withdrawal, and scanning.…”

“…The first goal of this study was to examine the regulatory strategies of toddlers and their mothers during a delay task. Based on past work (i.e., Cournoyer & Trudel, 1991;Mischel, 1974;Vaughn et al, 1986), it was expected that children who were able to forego touching the forbidden object would spend a majority of their time during the delay situation focused on other stimuli, whereas children who were not able to delay would spend relatively greater amounts of time looking at the toy that is off-limits. In addition, we predicted that mothers of successful delayers would perform more distracting behaviors and use fewer nondistracting strategies than mothers of toddlers who touched the toy.…”

A Comparison of Two-Stage Approaches for Fitting Nonlinear Ordinary Differential Equation Models with Mixed Effects

“…During the wait task (Cole et al, 2011; Vaughn, Kopp, & Krakow, 1984), children were told that they had to wait to open a gift until their mothers completed work. The delay in opening the gift, the absence of interesting alternative activities, and the loss of the mother’s attention jointly created a frustrating situation for the children.…”

Parenting and Preschool Self-Regulation as Predictors of Social Emotional Competence in 1st Grade

“…This literature began with a focus on the influence of children’s cognitive capacities on self-control (Mischel, 1983; Peake, Hebl, & Mischel, 2002; Sethi, Mischel, Aber, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 2000), which has evolved to include rigorous examinations of the contextual influences at play (i.e., Feldman & Klein, 2003; Jacobsen, 1998). From these contextual models of self-control, results indicate that maternal presence (Cournoyer & Trudel, 1991; Vaughn, Kopp, Krakow, Johnson, & Schwartz, 1986) and, further, particular components of parenting style, including directiveness or controlling/intrusive parenting, influence this aspect of children’s self-regulation (Russell et al, 2013; Silverman & Ippolito, 1995; Silverman & Ragusa, 1990). It is likely that these social influences generalize to other aspects of self-regulation beyond those concerned with self-control, as parental scaffolding in a responsive manner is also likely to shape children’s emotion regulation strategies.…”