Conflicts between immediately rewarding activities and more enduringly valued goals abound in
the lives of school-age children. Such conflicts call upon children to exercise self-control, a
competence which depends in large part on the mastery of metacognitive, prospective strategies.
The process model of self-control organizes these strategies into five families corresponding to
sequential phases in the process by which undesired and desired impulses lose or gather force
over time: Situation selection and situation modification strategies involve choosing or changing
physical or social circumstances. Attentional deployment and cognitive change strategies involve
altering whether and how objective features of the situation are mentally represented. Finally,
response modulation strategies involve the direct suppression or elevation of impulses. The
process model of self-control predicts that strategies deployed earlier in the process of impulse
generation and regulation will generally be more effective than those deployed later