SC Strategies and Delay of Gratification

Self-control plays an essential role in children’s emotional and behavioral adjustment. A central behavioral indicator of self-control is the ability to delay gratification. Few studies have focused on understanding the heterogeneity of self-control behaviors that underlie children’s ability to delay gratification. Therefore, we examined the role of spontaneous self-control behaviors (fidgeting, vocalizations, anticipation/attentional focus towards a reward) in relation to five-year old children’s delay ability, using a delay of gratification task.

Participants include a sample of children who originally participated in a study that commenced during the prenatal period and were recontacted when children were five years old (referred to as Cohort 1). An additional sample of mothers and their biological 5-year-old children from the same local area (referred to as Cohort 2) were included. This dataset includes variables describing children's ability to delay gratification, self-control behaviors coded during the delay of gratification task (by 30-second epochs and overall during the task; a primary coder coded every video. Twenty percent of videos were double coded to establish reliability), and maternal and child covariates (i.e., age, sex, maternal distress, child BMI, etc.).

We used latent mixture modeling to derive three distinct classes of self-control behaviors observed during the delay task: 1) Passive: low fidgeting, low vocalizations, but moderate anticipation; 2) Active: moderate fidgeting, moderate vocalizations, but high anticipation; and 3) Disruptive: high fidgeting, high vocalizations, and high anticipation). Our findings show that children in the Passive class were more likely to delay the full task time compared to children in the Active class (OR = 1.5, 95% CI: 1.28, 1.81). There were no other differences in delay ability by self-control class.