The development and prediction of young children's behavioral mastery motivation

The goal of this study was to investigate the development of young children's goal-directed behaviors in challenging settings––an important behavioral component of mastery motivation – and to examine the relations of maternal warmth and control to its trajectory from toddlerhood to preschool age. A behavioral component of mastery motivation was observed during children's (N = 251, 140 boys) increasingly challenging cognitive tasks at 18, 30, 42, and 54 months of age. Maternal warmth and assertive physical control were observed in both the challenging cognitive task and a challenging social task (i.e., clean-up task) at 18 months. A latent basis growth curve was identified, which suggested that this aspect of children's mastery motivation increased at different speeds from 18 to 54 months. Specifically, it increased 25% of the overall change between 18 and 30 months, increased only 2% between 30 to 42 months, and then increased by 73% from 42 to 54 months. Maternal high warmth and low assertive physical control during the challenging cognitive task were related to a higher initial intercept but a slower increasing slope of this aspect of mastery motivation over time. In a somewhat similar manner, in the challenging social task, maternal high warmth and low maternal assertive physical control were at least marginally related to a high initial intercept, but the two maternal behaviors were unrelated to the slope. This study is one of the first to identify the longitudinal developmental trajectory of this behavioral component of mastery motivation in very young children, and the results point to the importance of reducing maternal assertive physical control across contexts to foster the early development of mastery motivation.