Young children calibrate effort based on the trajectory of their performance.

Learning requires effort, but children cannot try hard at everything. Here, we evaluated whether children use their improvement over time to decide whether to stick with a challenge. To eliminate the effect of individual differences in ability or prior knowledge, we created a novel paradigm that allowed us to surreptitiously control children's performance. Across three preregistered experiments (N = 319, ages 4 to 6 in the United States), we found that children who were given evidence that their performance was improving were more likely to persist on a challenging task than children who were given evidence that their performance was constant, even when final performance was matched. This effect was robust to differing reward contingencies, across in-person and online testing contexts, and was driven by the demotivating effect of constant performance. Our results suggest that young children will be more persistent if they are guided away from too-difficult tasks and toward opportunities that enable steady growth. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Daily fluctuations in young children's persistence.

Children's behavior changes from day to day, but the factors that contribute to its variability are understudied. We developed a novel repeated measures paradigm to study children's persistence by capitalizing on a task that children complete every day: toothbrushing (N = 81; 48% female; 36-47 months; 80% white, 14% Multiracial, 10% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 1% Black; 1195 observations collected between January 2019 and March 2020). Children brushed longer on days when their parents used more praise (d = .23) and less instruction (d = -.22). Sensitivity to mood, sleep, and parent stress varied across children, suggesting that identifying the factors that shape an individual child's persistence could lead to personalized interventions.