Control yourself! How self-regulation performance develops over time.

“Research is me-search.” This is what my wife heard on her first day of her doctoral program in clinical psychology. And sure enough, as they went around the room introducing themselves, each person would say something like, “Hi, my name’s Morgan and I’m interested in studying depression because…I have struggled with depression...” If I were in the room, I would’ve fessed up to something similar: “Hi, my name is Jeff and I study self-regulation because, ever since I was young, I’ve struggled with self-regulation.”

I cried every day in kindergarten. Every. Day. Sure, a lot kids cried at first but everyone else settled down over time - I didn’t. The smallest things would set me off: cutting a piece of paper incorrectly, not liking a drawing I made, or even spilling my milk. It was tough and eventually the other kids started making fun of me for being so sensitive. Toward the end of the academic year, my mom took me to see my pediatrician and he wondered if the allergy medicine I was taking was making me hyperactive. He suggested stopping the medicine for a few days and sure enough, I stopped crying. But, self-regulation has been a challenge and interest of mine ever since. And I think it’s fair to say that one of the understudied areas in self-regulated learning research is development (Zimmerman did some work in this area, but more is needed).

How do people develop the skills needed to self-regulate? And why do those skills seem to change over time? Why do people seem quite good at self-regulating in some circumstances but not others? These are questions Wesarg-Menzel and colleagues (2023) sought to investigate via a meta-review (i.e., a review of other review papers). After synthesizing 136 relevant articles, they asserted self-regulation performance is the result of interactions among self-regulation abilities, people’s goals, and people’s motivations, and that all three of these phenomena are affected by social actors like parents, teachers, and peers. Importantly, they argued any particular act of self-regulation is affected by all three phenomena, which would explain why people with good self-regulation skills sometimes self-regulate poorly in certain circumstances (e.g., they had goals or motivations that led them to direct the self-regulation skills elsewhere in that moment). This is a really helpful synthesis of the literature, with useful implications for future research and practice, as well as a Rosetta-Stone-esque Table 1 where the authors attempted to sort out the various phenomena in the self-regulation literature, defining each. Definitely worth a read if you’re interested in how self-regulation develops. We need more research in this area, so we can develop interventions that help parents, teachers, and peers better support kids who might be a little hyperactive in kindergarten.