The emergence of procrastination in early childhood: Relations with executive control and future-oriented cognition.

Little is known about the development of procrastination, the tendency to postpone undesirable but necessary tasks, during early childhood. Only one study has measured procrastination behaviour in preschool children using a single behavioural task (Sutter et al., 2018). Thus, the present study investigated the emergence and development of everyday procrastination behaviour in preschool children and to explore its relations with executive function and future thinking using an adapted version of Lay’s (1986) General Procrastination Scale for use with parents of preschool children. Parents (81% White, 82% with an annual household income of over $40,000, and 92% had a post-secondary education) of 3- to 6-year-olds (N = 396; 175 girls) completed the Preschool Procrastination Scale, the Behaviour Rating Inventory of Executive Function – Preschool Version (Gioia et al., 2003), and the Children’s Future Thinking Questionnaire (Mazachowsky & Mahy, 2020). Naturalistic examples of children’s procrastination behaviour were collected to better understand the domains in which preschool children procrastinated. Results revealed that: (1) procrastination emerges early in preschool, (2) procrastination became more characteristic with age, (3) executive function and future thinking were negatively related to procrastination tendencies, (4) different components of future thinking and executive function predicted younger and older children’s procrastination, and (5) children procrastinated in different domains depending on their age and responsibilities. Our results suggest that children’s procrastination tendencies increase with age and develop alongside self-regulatory and future-oriented cognitive abilities.