Procrastination starts in early childhood and gets worse with age: study

Children are shown jumping on a bed in this file photo. (Jen grantham / Istock.com)

The tendency to procrastinate begins in early childhood and intensifies as we get older, according to a new study published in the March issue of the scientific journal Developmental Psychology.

More than just an inconvenient personality trait, the study's authors wrote that persistent procrastination is associated with negative long-term outcomes. People who procrastinate tend to be less organized and struggle with impulse and emotional regulation, as well as time and task management.

To understand how the tendency to procrastinate develops, researchers from the Brock University’s Department of Psychology analyzed the responses of 105 parents who completed a modified version of the General Procrastination Scale (GPS). The GPS is one of the most commonly-used measures of procrastination, and probes for signs of procrastination in different areas of everyday life, including academics, home life and decision making.

Only parents of children between three and six years old were included in the study. This way, the researchers could compare the results from parents of children in preschool with the results from parents of children in kindergarten or Grade 1. The researchers also collected anecdotal examples of children's procrastination tendencies from their parents, including statements such as, "She procrastinates with everything she doesn’t want to do.”

The goal was to study the development of everyday procrastination behaviour in preschool-aged children and to explore its relationship with executive function – which encompasses cognitive abilities responsible for the conscious control of thought and action – and future thinking.

"To date, research has largely focused on academic procrastination in school-age children, adolescents, and adults." the study's authors wrote. "Very little is known about preschool children’s procrastination, particularly in everyday life."

Results revealed that the tendency to procrastinate emerged early in the preschool years, but was more common in older, school-aged children.

The authors guessed older children show stronger procrastination tendencies because they have more responsibilities than younger children and therefore more opportunities to procrastinate.

"Older children’s procrastination seemed to reflect the increasing responsibilities and obligations that come with increasing age," they wrote. "This may suggest that procrastination increases as children gain autonomy and are assigned more undesirable tasks in home and academic settings."

They also found that the tendency to procrastinate was related to poorer executive function and future thinking skills, predictors of procrastination differed between younger and older children, and children procrastinated in different areas of life – such as school, home and decision making – depending on their age.

For example, younger children were reportedly more likely to procrastinate cleaning up after themselves and completing routines, while older children were more likely to procrastinate when it came to chores and schoolwork.

"This suggests that younger preschool children’s procrastination is related to greater impulsivity or difficulty regulating their emotions," the authors wrote, "whereas the tendency to procrastinate in older children seems to be related to higher-order reasoning abilities including self-projection into future episodes and constructing and carrying out multistep plans."

The researchers admitted their study was limited by a few factors. It did not include behavioural data, they did not interview children directly and the questionnaire measured the tendency to procrastinate as a trait, rather than by behavioural frequency.

"Future research should continue to examine the emergence and development of this behaviour in preschoolers as well as its relation to other cognitive and social abilities," they wrote.

METHOD

Researchers recruited 501 parents of three- to six-year-old children to participate in the current study via the online recruiting platform Prolific. The children were required to be developing typically and parents were required to be native English-speaking residents of the United States.

The final sample consisted of 396 parents, including 213 mothers, 177 fathers, one "other" and five who did not disclose. Of these participants, 117 were parents of a three year old, 126 were parents of a four year old, 94 were parents of a five year old and 59 were parents of a six year old. Initial analysis showed sex was not related to a child's procrastination score, so the authors excluded it from their main analysis.

Seventy-one per cent of parents of children three and four years old reported that their children attended either daycare or preschool and 73 per cent of parents of children five and six years old reported that their children attended either kindergarten or Grade 1.

Parents were 81.8 per cent white, 12.1 per cent Black or African American, 7.3 per cent Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish, 2.8 per cent Asian, 2 per cent Indigenous, 0.5 per cent Asian Indian, 0.3 per cent Middle Eastern and 0.8 per cent “other,” according to the study.