Keeping it Together: Measuring Childhood Self-Control Through Daily Increases in Activity (DIA)

Research on children’s self-control has generally relied on parent and teacher ratings, which are subject to well-known biases and obscure daily within-person variability. We developed and validated a novel, objective measure of childhood self-control using actigraphy data. Daily Increases in Activity (DIA) scores were theorized to reflect a school-age child’s inability to maintain control of their physical activity throughout the day. In a national sample of children followed from birth to age 26 (N = 747), children with higher DIA scores were rated as more impulsive and disruptive by their teachers and classroom observers, were less successful academically in high school (β = -0.11), and had completed less education as adults (β = -0.05). DIA was unrelated to children’s family income and race/ethnicity. Actigraphy provides an objective, naturalistic, and scalable way to observe individual differences in children’s self-control by leveraging within-person variability across the school day.