The development of message strategies is dependent on the underlying social cognitive structures through which they are formulated. (1) Research in the area has produced six generalizations concerning the development of persuasive skills: individuals' interpersonal perceptions change systematically with age; (2) children's persuasive strategies become increasingly sophisticated at adapting to the perspective of the listener; (3) the acquisition of adaptative strategies is dependent on social cognitive development; (4) social cognitive development is a necessary but an insufficient condition for communicative adaptation; (5) children's abilities to provide a rationale or justification for particular persuasive messages show a developmental trend that is correlated with differentiation, abstractness, and the level of adaptation reflected in persuasive messages generated for independent situations; and (6) allowing children to select from preformulated messages, even when these messages are explicitly constructed to represent varying levels of listener adaptation, provides a poor assessment of communicative development. These structures suggest that any program of training to facilitate communication development in children must be tied to the development of the underlying requisite social cognitive skills. (HOD)