children’s social, emotional and behavioral problems in response to risk. With relevance to the emergence of adjustment problems and psychopathology, effortful control appears to be a central construct in this endeavor. Effortful control reflects an individual’s ability to act purposefully in modulating thoughts, emotions and behavior, and therefore, has broad-reaching implications for children’s adjustment. Evidence shows that effortful control is a critical predictor of a range of indicators of children’s adjustment, and it moderates the relation between contextual risk and adjustment problems. Given this, it is important to understand not only how effortful control develops in children growing up in high-risk contexts but also the family and contextual factors that shape its development. ]