Does procrastination exist in young children, and does it persist into adulthood?

Every parent and educator is familiar with a young child avoiding a task they may not want to do (such as packing away toys) in favour of something more desirable (like watching tv). 

Is this procrastination? Avoidance? Something more? And do these habits carry through into adulthood? 

These are questions Brock Professor of Psychology Caitlin Mahy is taking steps to answer in her new research, which calls for procrastination definitions, theory and interventions to be informed by studies on adults and children, which have so far run parallel to one another.

“Research on procrastination in young children is an emerging field,” she explained. “The same measures we use to study adult procrastination don’t necessarily apply to children at different stages of development.”

By taking this approach, researchers will more deeply understand how procrastination plays out in young children as they mature, leading to better early-life interventions, Professor Mahy hopes.

She recently co-published a paper calling for the changes she seeks, and mapping out children’s typical procrastination-type behaviours in various stages beginning with preschoolers (ages two to four years of age), who put off tasks and household routines; older preschoolers (ages five and six years of age), who delay doing homework and household chores; elementary and middle-school children (ages seven to 13 years of age), who experience an increase in academic procrastination; and high school teens (ages 14 to 18 years of age), for whom procrastination is prominent at school as competing demands on time increase.

As time passes, children generate more simultaneous goals, while parents play a decreasing role in generating, directing and regulating goals for their children, she found.

Defining procrastination

Researchers probing for a greater understanding of these behaviours mostly rely on reports from parents describing what they see with their children compared to studies on adult procrastinators who fill out questionnaires on their own behaviours, Professor Mahy said.

The standard definition of procrastination includes five criteria: there is an intention to perform the task; the task is delayed; the delay is voluntary; the delay is unnecessary; and future negative outcomes are expected.

“Very young children have difficulty reporting on their intentions,” she continued, “Even if we study their behaviour, you don’t necessarily know the child’s intentions, you can’t read their mind to see if they’ve anticipated future consequences, you’re just observing their delay in performing tasks.”

Because young children’s abilities to be introspective and fully understand the consequences of their delays are absent, their behaviours can’t be strictly classified as being “procrastination, according to the current, prevalent definition,” the Professor added.

“Instead, we can say these may be early pre-cursors or represent emerging procrastination behaviour.”

In addition to reshaping the definition of procrastination to capture children’s experience, Mahy and her team describe how theory and intervention could be further improved by considering adult and child research.

They outline several cognitive abilities, such as emotion regulation, that likely contribute to the development of procrastination. They also recommend more research on the development of children’s procrastination over time and across age ranges, as well as the creation of more objective ways of assessing children’s procrastination.

These and other findings are included in “Mutual implications of procrastination research in adults and children for theory and intervention” — published in the September issue of Nature Reviews Psychology — in which co-authors Yuko Munakata from the University of California Davis and Akira Miyake from the University of Colorado Boulder review a broad range of research on adults’ and children’s procrastination.