288 III. DEvELOPMENT
future, develop greater independence, and 
work on adopting the norms and roles of 
their societies, they begin to be able to en -
gage in self-  directed pursuit of particular 
goals, and they learn coping strategies as 
they encounter challenges in the pursuit of 
those goals. As Lancy and Grove (2011, 
p. 281) concluded from their ethnographic 
work on middle childhood across the globe, 
“Middle childhood is about coming out of 
the shadows of community life and assum -
ing a distinct, lifetime character.” It is to the 
description of that character that I now turn.
Personality Traits in Middle Childhood: 
The “Little Six”
Because of the significant cognitive, social, 
and emotional changes that take place dur -
ing the 5- to 7-year shift, school-  age children 
are able to become actors  who display a rich, 
complex set of traits on a “stage” that is far 
broader than that in early childhood. Over 
the last 25 years, it has become increasingly 
clear that personality traits are organized in 
middle childhood in a Big Five trait struc -
ture similar to that seen in adults, but with 
some significant differences in the traits’ 
content and structure, and with the addition 
of a sixth trait—  namely, activity. In this sec -
tion, I review what is known about the traits 
that emerge earlier in childhood, before the 
school-  age years, the basic structure and 
content of personality traits in middle child -
hood, and the rank-order and mean-level 
stability and change in these traits.
Traits in  Early  Childhood
The Big Five traits in middle childhood 
emerge out of a narrower range of traits in 
early childhood. The traits displayed by in -
fants and toddlers are typically called “tem -
perament” rather than personality traits, 
but, in fact, there are good reasons to believe 
that the temperament and personality traits 
are essentially the same basic set of disposi -
tions. As discussed here, the two sets of traits 
show considerable overlap in their content 
and basic structure. Furthermore, they are 
both shaped by complex interactions among 
genetic, biological, and environmental fac -
tors across time (Shiner & De Young, 2013). As children grow older, their growing capac -
ities and broadening environments enable 
them to display a broader range of traits. In 
addition, new genetic influences contribute 
to increasing variation in personality traits 
over time from late childhood through late 
adolescence (Kandler, Waaktaar, Mõttus, 
Riemann, & Torgersen, 2019). But the na -
ture of the basic traits is not fundamentally 
different over time.
There is general consensus for three over -
arching temperament traits in early child -
hood (Rothbart, 2011; Shiner et al., 2012). 
Surgency  taps children’s tendencies toward 
sociability, positive emotions, and eager -
ness to engage in potentially pleasurable 
activities. Negative emotionality  measures 
children’s general tendencies toward a wide 
range of negative emotions, including fear, 
withdrawal, sadness, irritability, and frus -
tration. Effortful control  reflects children’s 
emerging behavioral constraint and regula -
tion, including the ability to sustain atten -
tion and persist at tasks. Although most 
of the support for these overarching traits 
comes from questionnaire research (Roth -
bart, 2011), there is also evidence for this 
three-trait structure in experimenter rat -
ings of 3- to 7-year-old children’s behavior 
during a set of lab tasks (Vroman, Lo, & 
Durbin, 2014).
These three traits may not encompass the 
full range of traits that children display in 
early childhood. Researchers’ conceptualiza -
tions of what is considered “temperament” 
often lead them to leave out other tenden -
cies that are displayed by young children, 
leading to distortions in our understanding 
of trait structure early in life (Shiner & De 
Young, 2013). For example, temperament 
measures typically leave out agreeableness 
and openness, and aspects of the other Big 
Five traits that emerge somewhat later in 
the preschool years, because of a priori as -
sumptions that these tendencies are not part 
of temperament. Yet when these other traits 
are assessed in preschoolers, they yield a 
coherent structure that resembles the struc -
ture seen in middle childhood. For example, 
when parents rated their 4- to 5-year-old 
children on several temperament measures 
and a Big Five measure, the results provided 
evidence for traits resembling low extraver -
sion, negative emotionality, conscientious -