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Read the full study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology at bit.ly/1lDm3b2.
Children who spend time participating in less-structured activities have better goal-setting abilities and an easier time meeting those goals without prompting from adults, a new University of Colorado study suggests.
The study, published online this week in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, was led by a team of researchers from the psychology and neuroscience department on the Boulder campus.
The research was an attempt to provide evidence for the debate over parenting styles, though more investigation needs to be done before people use the findings as a parenting guide, said doctoral student Jane Barker.
"These are basic questions that policymakers and parents are really interested in," Barker said. "Does structure in children's lives rally matter? Is play important?"
The ability to set and complete goals is often described as self-directed executive functioning — it connects past experience with present action. It's associated with activities like planning, organizing and managing times.
An example the researchers give in the study is children's decision to put on a coat — without a parent telling them to — before heading outside to play in the cold.
Because childhood executive function can predict important life outcomes such as wealth, health and chance of incarceration, many experts and parents are interested in improving this trait early in a child's life.
Parents of 6- and 7-year-olds reported their children's activities for a week and categorized them as either more structured or less structured.
More-structured activities included chores, physical lessons, non-physical lessons and religious activities, while less-structured activities included playing alone and with others, social outings, sight-seeing, reading and media time.
The researchers then assessed the children's executive functioning using a verbal fluency task in which children decide on their own when to switch to the next category.
The more time that children spent in less-structured activities, the better their self-directed executive functioning, the researchers discovered. The opposite was true of structured activities, which correlated with poorer self-directed executive functioning.
"Our basic hypothesis is that (less-structured activities) afford time for children to practice these executive function skills and practice being self-directed in different kinds of environments," Barker said.
For now, the work is still correlational, Barker said, which means it's not clear if children with better executive functioning are drawn to less-structured activities, or if participating in less-structured activities leads to better executive functioning.