Future-oriented cognition (planning, prospective memory, episodic foresight, saving, and delay of gratification) involves a critical set of skills that children must develop for successful daily functioning. The current study developed the Children's Future Thinking Questionnaire (CFTQ), a parent-report on 3-to 7-year-olds' future-oriented cognition. The CFTQ showed high internal consistency and detected development of future-oriented cognition (Study 1; N = 145). Study 2 (N = 255) showed high internal consistency reliability and preliminary validity of the CFTQ. Study 3 (N = 101) confirmed strong reliability and validity of the CFTQ. Study 4 (N = 105) revealed excellent test-retest reliability of the CFTQ. Thus, the CFTQ is the first reliable and valid parent-report measure of children's developing future-oriented cognitive abilities.

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The current study examined the impact of psychological distance on children's performance on the pretzel task. In this task, children eat pretzels (inducing thirst) and then are asked to reason about future preferences (pretzels or water). Children typically perform poorly on this task, indicating a future preference for water over pretzels, potentially due to conflicting current and future states. Given past work showing that children's future reasoning is more accurate for another person, we asked 90 thirsty 3‐ to 7‐year‐olds to reason about their own and an experimenter's future preference. Results showed that thirsty children had more difficulty predicting their own future preference compared with the experimenter's. Thirstier children were more likely to predict a future preference for water. Thirst interacted with age when making a future choice for the experimenter. How psychological distance might boost episodic foresight and possible reasons for children's poor pretzel task performance are discussed. Highlights Does psychological distancing improve children's ability to make accurate future predictions when current and future states conflict? Using the Pretzel task, thirsty children were less accurate when predicting their own future preferences compared with the future preferences of another person. Psychological distancing may help children overcome their current state to reason more accurately about the future.

What supports the development of children's prospective memory? Examining the relation between children's prospective memory, memory strategy use, and parent scaffolding.

Prospective memory (PM) tasks have been described as social in nature because carrying out one's intentions often has an impact on others. Despite the claim that PM errors (compared to retrospective memory [RM] errors) are perceived as character flaws, little empirical work has tested this assertion. In particular, no study has examined how adults perceive children's PM errors. Thus, the aim of the current studies was to examine adults' perceptions of children's forgetfulness depending on child age (4 vs. 10-year-olds), domain of the memory error (academic vs. social), and memory type (PM vs. RM). In Study 1, adult participants rated children's PM errors on seven traits. Findings showed that social errors were rated more negatively than academic errors, and age and domain interacted such that 10-year-olds were rated more negatively than 4-year-olds for making social errors but not academic errors. Study 2 examined the impact of child age, domain, and memory type on perceptions of forgetful children to specifically test differences between PM and RM errors. Results showed a larger difference between ratings of 10-year-olds for their academic and social memory errors compared to 4year-olds, but only for RM errors.