Emerging Metacognitive Processes During Childhood: Implications for Intervention Development with Children

This paper reviews the literature of how three aspects of metacognition, relevant to working with children in clinical settings, develop across childhood. In cognitive therapy children use their metacognition to monitor the recall of thoughts from memory and to control thoughts as they are actively worked on and restructured. This paper will show that over childhood children use metacognitive monitoring and control abilities in increasingly complex ways and it will provide the ages at which children may be consistently using the cognitive abilities necessary to fully benefit from cognitive therapies.