Abstract

This chapter focuses on self-conceptions and motivational processes in young children, a topic of interest for several reasons. First, greater understanding of motivational processes in young children can provide insight into the origins of adaptive and maladaptive functioning. Second, from a theoretical and empirical standpoint, it is a topic that has been somewhat shrouded in mystery. That is, although maladaptive motivational patterns had been identified and studied in older children for quite some time, these patterns had not been found in younger children (below the age of about 8 or 9), and, in fact, were widely believed not to exist. In this chapter, I first describe the adaptive and maladaptive motivational patterns that characterize older children, contrasting the mastery-oriented pattern of challenge-seeking and effective persistence with the helpless pattern of risk avoidance and impairment in the face of difficulty. I show how these patterns are related to the conceptions about their intelligence that children hold. I then discuss why younger children were believed to be exclusively mastery-oriented, and present a series of studies from our laboratory demonstrating that they are not. Indeed, a sizable proportion of young children (as young as preschool and kindergarten age) exhibit every aspect of the helpless pattern. Moreover, this pattern is linked to children's self-conceptions: not to their conceptions about their intelligence, but to their conceptions about their goodness and badness – the domain of greatest relevance to children in this age group.