Developmental Trajectories Of Children's Effortful Control And Its Reciprocal Influence With Problem Behaviors

In early childhood, effortful control plays an important role in children's socialization process. Effortful control is an important ability to inhibit an instinct or dominant response in the service of performing a subdominant response, the ability can help individual to inhibit the inappropriate behavior and initiate a proper one. Effortful control can help children to regulation their behavior, and then decrease the prolem behaviors. However, there is no consistent conclusion about the effect between effortful control and problem behavior. The present research followed up 280 children from 2 years old to 7 years old to explore the development of children's effortful control and its reciprocal influence with problems behaviors. Specifically, when children at the age of 2,4 and 7 years old, they were invited to the laboratory to finish the delay of gratification task, their parents reported children's externalizing problem behavior and internalizing problem behavior at the same time. General speaking, children's effortful control and behavioral problems have a certain degree of stability; relatively, toddlers'effortful control have stronger predictive power to their behavior problems.Specificly, the results are as follows:(1) From toddlerhood to early school age, effortful control and problem behaviors have relative stibility, and keeps a linear growth trend; the initial level of children's effortful control have significant individual difference; however, with the increase of age, the growth rate of effortful control have no significant individual difference.(2) From toddlerhood to early school age, both father reported and mother reported children's externalizing problem behaviors have relative stibility.(3) From toddlerhood to early school age, both father reported and mother reported children's internalizing problem behaviors have relative stibility.(4) The toddlers' effortful control can predict father and mother reported preschool children's externalizing problem negatively; mother reported preschool children's externalizing problem can predict the early school children's effortful control negatively.(5) The preschool children's effortful control can predict father reported early school age children's internalizing problem; from toddlerhood to early school age, there is no significant predict relationship between parents reported children's internalizing problem and children's effortful control.