A Correlation Study Between Temperament And Self-control Of 4-year-old Children

Self-control is that person acquire their own psychology and behavior initiatively, and that choose target consciously, and that to overcome difficulties, eliminate interference, to take control of their actions so as to ensure the achievement of objectives in the absence of external constraints. The development of self-control has great significance. It can promote the development of children's physical and mental health and can promote children's socialization and development of personality.This study selected 4-year-old children, tried to explore the relationship between children's temperament and self-control. So that we can determine how the temperament of inhibition or non-inhibition impacts self-control.The first part described the research of domestic and foreign scholars in the field of self-control and the significance of this study. The second part is the research methods. The study surveyed 37 young children who are 4-year-old from 3 different kindergartens in Dalian, half boys and half girls. This study use laboratory observes method to measure children's temperament, as well as the development of committed-compliance and delay of gratification. After coding and scoring, we can get the child's scores of temperament and self-control. SPSS12.0 we used in data analysis. We described the results in the third part, including the relationship between committed-compliance and delay of gratification of 4-year-old children; the relationship between temperament and self-control; the relationship between temperament and committed-compliance; the relationship between temperament and delay of gratification; the regression analysis about temperament and committed-compliance; and the gender differences about self-control in 4-year-old children. We discussed the reason about the results in the fourth part, and provides theoretical support for it. Part five showed on the final conclusions of this paper.This study reached the following conclusions: (1) The committed-compliance and delay of gratification in 4-year-old children correlate significantly. Both committed-compliance and delay of gratification belong to self-control, and they are the content and performance of self-control; (2)The 4-year-old children's temperament both correlate self-control and committed-compliance significantly, but not significantly to delay of gratification, that means non-inhibition-type child developed a better self-control, and inhibition-type child developed a poor self-control. Non-inhibition-type child developed a better committed-compliance, and inhibition-type child developed a poor committed-compliance. Though the non-inhibition-type child may developed a better delay of gratification, but it's not reach the significant level on statistics; (3) 4-year-old children's development of self-control there is no significant gender differences. The scores of boys on self-control and committed-compliance were higher than girls', but not reach the significant level on statistics. The scores of girls on delay of gratification is higher than boys', but not reach the significant level on statistics too; (4) The experiments we used in this study, that meet a good reliability, can be used as a tool for future research.