Investigating the development and coherence of young children’s saving skills

Reserving resources for future use, or saving, is an ability that emerges around the age of three. However, young children often struggle to save resources. Previous research has examined saving primarily in two domains; token and item saving. However, in day-to-day life children save many other things as well, such as time and space. Children's saving might also be influenced by practices that they and their parents engage in. Thus, the current study investigated: (a) the development of young children's saving, (b) the coherence of saving of four different resources, and (c) the influence of family saving practices on children's saving. Three- to 6-year-old children (N = 98) completed five saving tasks, measuring token, item (marbles and stickers), space, and time saving. Their parents completed two questionnaires tapping into children's saving in everyday life and family saving practices. Children's saving mostly increased with age. Children's saving of abstract resources (tokens, space, and time) cohered, while saving of concrete items (marbles and stickers) cohered. No parental practices predicted children's saving; however, child practices predicted time saving in particular. Broadly, children's saving skills increased with age, with abstract resources (i.e., tokens, space and time) and concrete resources (marbles and stickers) emerging as distinct domains of saving, even after controlling for age and receptive vocabulary scores. This study adds to the existing literature on the development of children's saving and expands our knowledge of how children save different types of resources.