 12. Personality Development in Middle Childhood  297
early adolescence, youth increasingly use the 
more mature strategies of engagement and 
internal cognitive coping across the ado -
lescent years (Seiffge-  Krenke et al., 2009). 
There is evidence that different coping strat -
egies are associated with lower or higher lev -
els of psychological symptoms concurrently, 
but in a recent meta-  analysis, Compas et al. 
(2017) found surprisingly little evidence that 
youths’ coping strategies predict psychologi -
cal symptoms across time. Despite the large 
number of studies on children’s coping strat -
egies, surprisingly little is known about their 
developmental course, so much remains to 
be learned about their emergence, stability, 
and change over time.
Conclusion and  Directions 
for Future Research
Two decades ago, I posed the question 
“How shall we speak of children’s person -
alities in middle childhood?” (Shiner, 1998). 
I proposed a tentative answer organized 
around a set of personality traits identified 
in multiple research programs spanning 
temperament and personality: sociability, 
social inhibition, dominance, negative emo -
tionality, aggressiveness, prosocial disposi -
tion, persistence/attention, mastery motiva -
tion, inhibitory control, and activity. Today 
it is clearer that these more narrowly defined 
personality traits are structured as the “Lit -
tle Six,” including the Big Five plus Activ -
ity. In the two decades since that review 
was published, it has also become clear that 
school-  age children’s personalities extend 
beyond these traits to include a wide vari -
ety of other individual differences, including 
children’s goals in specific domains of their 
lives, their overarching values, and their 
capacities for coping with stress and regu -
lating their emotions. In this chapter I have 
tried to convey the breadth of these person -
ality differences—  their structure, as well as 
their patterns of rank-order and mean-level 
change.
Although much has been learned over the 
past two decades about children’s personali -
ties in middle childhood, some foundational 
questions still remain unanswered. First, 
basic research on the structure of these in -
dividual differences remains important. For example, in the case of personality traits, al -
though there is good reason to be optimistic 
that we have the broad outlines of the traits 
right, at least in middle childhood, there is 
still much to be learned about how the mani -
festations of each trait change over time and 
how they differ from the manifestations in 
adulthood. As I mentioned previously, we 
also do not know the full structure of tem -
perament and personality traits earlier in 
childhood, because most research on tem -
perament has restricted the content of traits 
being measured based on researchers’ defini -
tions of what constitutes temperament. Fur -
thermore, some widely used childhood tem -
perament measures are problematic from a 
psychometric perspective (Kotelnikova et 
al., 2016; Kotelnikova, Olino, Klein, Mack -
rell, & Hayden, 2017), leaving the structure 
of temperament still unclear.
Intriguing studies on early and middle 
childhood suggest that temperament and 
personality questionnaire measures each 
offer important, nonoverlapping informa -
tion about children’s individual differences 
(De Pauw et al., 2009; Tackett, Kushner, 
De Fruyt, & Mervielde, 2013), so work on 
structure from early childhood through ado -
lescence may benefit from the inclusion of 
descriptors from both the temperament and 
the personality traditions. Additional struc -
tural work on children’s goals would also 
be helpful; although research on children’s 
goals has identified several important indi -
vidual differences in achievement and social 
goals, children surely have goals beyond the 
ones identified thus far. The rapid develop -
mental changes taking place in childhood 
make this an especially informative period 
for testing hypotheses about the mecha -
nisms underlying the observed structure of 
personality and the normative patterns of 
change in those traits over time.
A second, related direction for future 
work is both identifying the age at which 
children can provide self-  reports of their per -
sonalities and developing measures to enable 
children to do so. Despite the rich variety of 
personality differences evident in school-  age 
children, there is relatively less personality 
research conducted on this period of life, 
likely in part because of the measurement 
challenges during middle childhood. It is 
possible to obtain information about the 