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How do children’s personalities develop 
during middle childhood—  the span of life 
stretching from roughly age 5 or 6 to age 11 
or 12? Middle childhood is bookended by 
two periods of life that may seem more dra -
matic in their impact, namely, early child -
hood (infancy through preschool age) and 
adolescence. During early childhood and 
adolescence, the changes in youths’ physi -
cal, cognitive, and social–  emotional capaci -
ties may seem more significant, visible, and 
striking than the changes taking place dur -
ing middle childhood. Middle childhood 
may sometimes seem like a period of relative 
stability and consolidation rather than a pe -
riod of dynamic change. In contrast to such 
views of middle childhood as a more stable 
period, recent research has demonstrated 
that children begin to display a broad range 
of personality differences during the school- 
age years and that these personality differ -
ences lay an important foundation for the 
personality development that is to come in 
adolescence and adulthood.
McAdams (2015, 2019; Chapter 5, this 
volume) has articulated a helpful model for 
how personality differences emerge over 
the life course. In earliest childhood, chil -
dren are already actors  on the stages of their lives, displaying tendencies to think, 
feel, and behave in particular ways that are 
at least somewhat consistent across situa -
tions and time. These earliest tendencies are 
temperament traits that become elaborated 
over time and, by middle childhood, take 
the form of the broader Big Five personal -
ity traits (John, Chapter 2, this volume). By 
middle childhood, children start to become 
motivated agents  who are able to shape 
their lives as they pursue goals that are 
meaningful to them. These capacities for 
self- directed goal pursuit emerge as school- 
age children develop greater capacities in 
the domains of cognition, theory of mind, 
and self-  regulation. Finally, later in adoles -
cence, youth start to become authors  who 
cultivate narratives that weave together sto -
ries linking their past with their present and 
their expectations for the future. Although 
people do not develop fuller life narratives 
until later in adolescence, school-  age chil -
dren increasingly remember and elaborate 
on particularly important stories from their 
lives–  stories that may later be woven into 
their life narratives.
Figure 12.1  presents this developmental 
model for personality development. As the 
model would suggest, middle childhood is a CHAPTER 12
Personality Development  
in Middle Childhood
Rebecca  L. Shiner