Assessing Preschoolers' Self-Regulation in Homes and Classrooms: Lessons from the Field.

Behavioral disorders in young children represent one of the most challenging issues plaguing the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and early childhood education. Several lines of research have recently emerged in the literature with regard to problematic behaviors. First, researchers have begun to document the incidence of problematic behaviors, including those that reach clinical significance, in preschoolers. In fact, research with clinically referred preschoolers indicates that these children demonstrate significant rates of both internalizing and externalizing problematic behaviors, as measured by a variety of assessments including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-III-R) and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Keenan & Wakshlag, 2000; Luby & Morgan, 1997). Even in community samples, the prevalence of behavioral problems is not uncommon, with reports ranging from 21.4% in populations recruited from pediatricians (Lavigne et al., 1996) to 26.4% in samples from low-income populations (Keenan, Shaw, Walsh, Delliquadri, & Giovannelli, 1997). A second area of research focuses on the precursors of disorders in childhood. What dimensions of early childhood behavior might be relevant to later clinical diagnosis of attention deficit with hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), or conduct disorder (CD)? Some evidence does indeed suggest that aggression and other antisocial behaviors in the preschool years predict the presence of these kinds of mental health problems in later childhood (Campbell, 1991; Moffit, 1990; Moffit & Silva, 1988; Pierce, Ewing, & Campbell, 1999). Finally, in a third strand of research, researchers have begun to explore the processes underlying early behavioral problems. For example, the ability to self-regulate is thought to be central to childhood externalizing disorders such as ADHD (Barkley, 1997; Taylor, 1995), ODD (Campbell, 1994; Campbell & Ewing, 1990; Campbell, Pierce, Moore, Marakowitz, & Newby, 1996), and CD (Campbell, 1991). Aspects of dysregulation are also thought to be critical to the onset of eating disorders and depression in youth (Attie & Brooks-Gunn, 1995; Brooks-Gunn, Auth, Petersen, & Compas, in press). Similarly, a vast literature indicates a strong link between early self-regulation skills, such as inhibitory control, and later social competence (Eisenberg, Fabes, et al., 1997; Eisenberg, Guthrie, et al., 1997; Mischel & Rodriguez, 1993; Shields, Cicchetti, & Ryan, 1994). In the preschool years, self-regulation covers wide territory. Research that focuses on emotional regulation (Eisenberg, Fabes, et al., 1997; Eisenberg, Guthrie, et al., 1997; Kopp, 1989), executive function (Eslinger, 1996), and inhibitory control (Gerstadt, Hong, & Diamond, 1994; Kochanska, Murray, & Coy, 1997) each explore elements of self-regulation abilities. For our purposes, we were interested in two key facets of self-regulation: executive attention and inhibitory control. Executive attention involves the ability to exclude from consciousness irrelevant or extraneous factors in order to focus on a task, while inhibitory control entails the ability to stop a prepotent response in favor of a more unusual one. Within these two domains, we were interested in further examining a variety of constructs, including motor control, cognitive control, impulse control, delay of gratification, and sustained attention. Goal of the GAMES Project In the present study, our aim was to develop a battery of child self-regulation assessments for use in homes and classrooms with a wide range of families (i.e., beyond middle class), and with attention to possible difficulties in translating tasks for children who speak another language or come from a non-European-American cultural background. Toward this end, we have been involved in a project called Games As Measurement for Early Self-Control (GAMES). …