294 III. DEvELOPMENT
set the stage for important new develop -
ments in these individual differences. As I 
noted earlier, cognitive changes enable chil -
dren to imagine alternative futures, reason 
more about various options, and plan for 
themselves. Children also begin to be able 
to assess their own characteristics, particu -
larly in relation to others, and to reflect on 
what those characteristics mean for their 
lives. Their skills in self-  regulation improve, 
which gives them greater control over mak -
ing choices and directing their own actions. 
Finally, school-  age children spend their days 
learning the norms, skills, expectations, and 
roles of their societies as they spend more 
time outside the home at school and in inter -
action with peers. All of these developmen -
tal changes enable children to develop indi -
vidual differences in their emerging goals 
and plans, a sense of overarching values, and 
means of coping with stress and adversity— 
the personality differences I review in this 
section.
Goals
With the emergence of capacities for future 
thinking, planning, and decision making 
in the 5- to 7-year shift, children begin to 
discern what is important to them as indi -
viduals and formulate some sense of what 
they want to strive for in particular domains 
of their lives—in other words, they begin 
to develop a stronger sense of their daily 
goals. It is important to note that personal -
ity traits, like goals, involve individual dif -
ferences in motivation; for example, extra -
version involves approach motivation, and 
agreeableness includes the motivation for 
positive relationships with other people. 
Relative to other motivational constructs, 
goals are characterized by several distinctive 
features: They are focused on a particular 
object and on the future; people use them to 
direct or guide their behavior, either by ap -
proaching or avoiding something; and they 
are internally represented (Elliot & Fryer, 
2008). Goals thus have a narrower focus 
than other motivational constructs. Not sur -
prisingly, most of the research on goals in 
middle childhood has explored goals related 
to two of the central developmental tasks in 
this period: academic achievement and peer 
relationships.Because academic achievement is such 
an important developmental task in middle 
childhood, children’s achievement motiva -
tion has been a topic of research focus for 
many decades. This research has addressed 
multiple questions children may ask about 
their own academic achievement: Can I do 
the task? Do I want to do the task? Why am 
I doing the task? What do I need to do to 
succeed? (Wigfield et al., 2015, p. 657). The 
question that is particularly important for 
children’s emerging personalities is “Why 
am I doing the task?”; this focuses on chil -
dren’s achievement goal orientations or chil -
dren’s aims in doing their academic work. 
In different domains of their lives, children 
may be relatively intrinsically motivated— 
finding inherent enjoyment and interest in 
the task itself—  or relatively more extrinsi -
cally motivated, performing tasks for rea -
sons extrinsic to the task (e.g., winning 
others’ approval of others, avoiding pun -
ishment) (Ryan & Moller, 2017). Intrinsic 
motivation for academic tasks decreases 
modestly from late childhood through ado -
lescence, particularly in specific academic 
subjects such as math, and it shows a pattern 
of rank-order stability similar to personality 
traits at this age, namely, moderate to strong 
stability by middle childhood and increasing 
stability over time (Gottfried, Fleming, & 
Gottfried, 2001). Thus, intrinsic academic 
motivation, like the trait of openness (which 
shares a focus on curiosity and intellectual 
engagement) declines from middle child -
hood through adolescence.
Children’s achievement goal orientations 
can be broken down into more fine-  grained 
dimensions as well. Perhaps the most well- 
studied taxonomy for achievement goal ori -
entations is a 2 ( mastery,  or learning mate -
rial and improving, versus performance,  or 
demonstrating one’s competence for others) 
× 2 ( approach,  or moving toward some de -
sired end, vs. avoidance,  or moving away 
from a nondesirable end) model (Elliot & 
Hulleman, 2017). Thus, children may pur -
sue mastery-  approach  goals (learning and 
improvement), mastery-  avoidance  goals 
(pursuing perfection or avoiding losing one’s 
abilities), performance-  approach  goals 
(demonstrating one’s competence, or trying 
to do better than others), and performance-  
avoidance  goals (trying to avoid looking 