The strong association established between attention skills and school performance has led to increased research in understanding the development of children's attentional processes. How attention develops during early childhood is crucial to understanding partly why children enter school with varying readiness skills. This Snapshot highlights the importance of understanding attention as a multifaceted concept that relates to cognitive, socio-emotional, and motivational processes. The study examined how individual differences in children's temperament and motivation relate to attention skills in children from economically disadvantaged families. It demonstrated that even at 3 and 4 years old, children exhibit wide variations in non-cognitive characteristics that may be important in understanding how children will adjust to school. [This snapshot is published by the FPG Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina.]