RESUMO
The ability to save resources for future use, or saving, begins to emerge around 3 years of age, but children show low rates of saving during the preschool years. Thus, several strategies have been used to improve preschoolers' saving, such as providing a prompt, budgeting, increasing psychological distance, and simulating the future. The current study investigated (a) the development of saving in early childhood, (b) the impact of several saving strategies on children's saving (i.e., budgeting, tracking expenses, and psychological distance), and (c) whether the effectiveness of the strategies changed with age. Here, 3- to 5-year-old Canadian children (N = 254) completed the Saving Board Game, and their parents completed the saving subscale of the Children's Future Thinking Questionnaire. In the Saving Board Game, children were randomly assigned to one of the five strategies: (a) control, (b) budgeting, (c) tracking, (d) adult perspective, or (e) child perspective. An analysis of covariance with age, strategy, and response option order (as a covariate) showed a main effect of age, with 5-year-olds saving more than 3-year-olds. There was no effect of strategy or an interaction between strategy and age on children's token saving. Parent-reported child saving was positively correlated with children's Saving Board Game performance only in the control condition. We consider why these strategies failed to increase children's saving.
RESUMO
Little is known about the development of procrastination, the tendency to postpone undesirable but necessary tasks, during early childhood. Only one study has measured procrastination behavior in preschool children using a single behavioral task (Sutter et al., 2018). Thus, the present study investigated the emergence and development of everyday procrastination behavior in preschool children and to explore its relations with executive function and future thinking using an adapted version of Lay's (1986) General Procrastination Scale for use with parents of preschool children. Parents (81% White, 82% with an annual household income of over $40,000, and 92% had a postsecondary education) of 3- to 6-year-olds (N = 396; 175 girls) completed the Preschool Procrastination Scale, the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function-Preschool Version (Gioia et al., 2003), and the Children's Future Thinking Questionnaire (Mazachowsky & Mahy, 2020). Naturalistic examples of children's procrastination behavior were collected to better understand the domains in which preschool children procrastinated. Results revealed that: (a) procrastination emerges early in preschool, (b) procrastination became more characteristic with age, (c) executive function and future thinking were negatively related to procrastination tendencies, (d) different components of future thinking and executive function predicted younger and older children's procrastination, and (e) children procrastinated in different domains depending on their age and responsibilities. Our results suggest that children's procrastination tendencies increase with age and develop alongside self-regulatory and future-oriented cognitive abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).