A Naturalistic Investigation of Children’s Future-Oriented Behavior

• In Event: The Development of Future-Thinking Across Childhood

Abstract

Children express their thoughts about the future through their statements (e.g., “I want to go to the park tomorrow”) and actions (e.g., bringing a toy for a long car ride). However, laboratory measures only test for specific types of future thought (e.g., do children select a specific item for a future event?) and may not reflect the breadth of children’s future thinking, nor its function in children’s day-to-day lives. To our knowledge, there are no studies that have systematically tracked both children’s future-oriented statements and actions outside of the laboratory. In this study, we recruited 10 mothers from a university participant database and asked them to observe their children (n=12, projected N = 30) for a 7-day period without making changes to their regular schedules. The children were divided into older (6- and 7-year-olds; n=6) and younger (3- and 4-year-olds; n=6) age groups. Mothers were asked to identify and document their children’s future-oriented statements and actions via “Instances” questionnaires. Importantly, these actions and statements (i.e., instances) needed to be spontaneous; that is, they could not be the result of a parent telling/asking the child to prepare for the future, nor be in response to a question about the future. This was to help ensure that we captured children’s self-directed or independent thought about the future. We predicted that parents would report significantly more instances in older children, as compared to younger ones. This is because such spontaneous instances of future thought require cognitive control and may only appear around middle childhood (Brinums et al., 2021). Our method yielded a total of 209 instances of parent-reported future thinking (198 statements and 11 actions). Although parents reported more instances in older children (n = 145) than younger children (n = 64), this difference was not significant, p = .178. We used thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to classify the types of statements and actions that parents reported and identified four themes: 1) Information-seeking about the future, 2) predicting future mental or physiological states, 3) expressing intent/desire for the future and 4) acting (or not acting) now for a specific future purpose. Interestingly, Themes 2-4 map onto an existing taxonomy of future thinking in adults (Szpunar et al., 2014). Themes 1 (n = 57 instances) and 3 (n = 97) were the most prevalent. Theme 1 may reflect a future-oriented function particularly relevant to young children: “information seeking.” This may be because, unlike adults, young children have little control over their environments. In contrast Themes 2 (n = 7) and 4 (n = 43) were the least prevalent which suggests that children need to first acquire information about what will happen in their futures before they can “predict” (Theme 2) or act to fulfill their future needs (Theme 4). However, lack of information about the future, does not appear to preclude children from expressing intent/desires for the future (i.e., Theme 3). Our findings highlight an intriguing barrier (i.e., information seeking) to children’s more sophisticated thoughts about the future (e.g., predicting and planning).

Authors

• Gladys Ayson, University of Ottawa
  Presenting Author

• Cristina Atance, University of Ottawa