298 III. DEvELOPMENT
traits of younger children through a variety 
of means—  parent and teacher reports, be -
havioral observations, and laboratory tasks. 
But some of these methods may pose chal -
lenges in middle childhood. Parents and 
teachers may have less insight into some as -
pects of school-  age children’s personalities 
as their personalities become more complex 
(e.g., adults may have difficulty with rat -
ing children’s neuroticism accurately), and 
school-  age children may sometimes be too 
self- conscious to be observed or to complete 
lab tasks. In adolescence, it is easier to turn 
to self-  reports to assess youths’ personali -
ties.
Thus, research on middle childhood 
would benefit from the development of new 
self- report measures to fill this gap. Chil -
dren can provide self-  reports of the Big Five 
traits by around the age of 5, using a one-
on-one puppet procedure (Measelle, John, 
Ablow, Cowan, & Cowan, 2005; see also, 
Coughlin, Robins, & Ghetti, 2019). Chil -
dren as young as age 7 can also report on 
their social goals when assisted with reading 
and completing measures (Rudolph et al., 
2011), and on their values when presented 
with a simplified picture-  based version of a 
values scale (Döring, Blauensteiner, Aryus, 
Drogekamp, & Bilsky, 2010; Uzefovsky et 
al., 2016). The creative development of new 
methods for children’s self-  reports of their 
personalities has the potential to significant -
ly advance this area of research.
Third, basic questions remain about how 
personality differences in middle childhood 
are related both to each other and to ear -
lier traits. A meta-  analysis of the associa -
tions between traits and coping in youth and 
adults (Connor-  Smith & Flaschbart, 2007) 
revealed only modest associations between 
the two domains; traits were more strong -
ly related to coping strategies in younger 
samples than older ones, perhaps because 
children have less well-  developed strategies 
that they can use to overcome their tempera -
mental responses to stress. At this point, 
there is little known about how children’s 
personality traits concurrently relate to their 
goals and values, however. It is also largely 
unknown whether children’s earlier tem -
perament traits shape the emergence of their 
later goals, values, and coping strategies. Al -though I have suggested in Figure 12.1 that 
earlier temperament traits are likely to play 
a part in shaping children’s later goals, val -
ues, and coping strategies, few studies have 
investigated whether temperament does play 
a role in the development of these other 
aspects of personality. There is also much 
more to learn about how children’s person -
ality differences set the stage for their chang -
ing personalities in adolescence.
Finally, I have focused throughout this 
chapter on the first two levels of McAd -
ams’s personality model—the individual as 
actor and agent. The third level—the indi -
vidual as author —does not emerge in full 
form until adolescence, when youth begin 
to create life narratives for themselves (Mc -
Adams, 2015, 2019). Although the process 
of developing life narratives does not de -
velop in full form until adolescence, chil -
dren begin the process of co-  narrating their 
experiences with their parents and other 
adults earlier in childhood (Fivush, Reese, 
& Booker, 2019); this is an important pro -
cess through which children learn about 
themselves within their broader sociocul -
tural context. Already by age 8, children 
are able to tell single-  event stories (Bohn 
& Berntsen, 2008) and tend to pick a simi -
lar set of important life stories over a short 
time interval (Köber & Habermas, 2017), 
but it is not until the transition to adoles -
cence that youth begin to acquire cultural 
life scripts that enable them to weave these 
stories together into more coherent life nar -
ratives (Bohn & Berntsen, 2008; Köber & 
Habermas, 2017) and to interpret the sig -
nificance of their life stories (Pasupathi & 
Wainryb, 2010). Nonetheless, there is still 
much to learn about children’s individual 
differences in their storytelling about their 
lives, even in middle childhood.
In contrast to views of middle childhood 
as a relatively stagnant period in personal -
ity development, the research reviewed in 
this chapter portrays this period of life as 
an especially dynamic time for development 
in personality traits, goals, values, and cop -
ing. Children enter the broader world in new 
ways in middle childhood, and researchers 
would do well to take notice of how chil -
dren’s personalities reveal themselves in this 
process.