The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of self-instruction on children's resistance to temptation. It was expected that task relevant self-instruction would be effective for self-control, and verbal control would vary from overt to covert: i. e. the covert self-instruction would become as effective as the overt. The task-relevant instruction especially meant the reward-oriented or temptation-inhibiting instruction. Furthermore, the children who were trained to self-instruct would be expected to resist the later test situation. The purpose of the experiment I was to examine the effects of overt or covert self-instruction on resistance to temptation. Sixty-nine children, from 3 to 6 years of age, were asked to perform the repetitive task facing temptation. They were given task -facilitating self-instruction by the experimenter, and instructed to verbalize when they felt like looking at the temptation. O group was instructed to verbalize overtly and C group covertly; OC group was first overtly and then covertly. I group was given task-irrelevant self-instruction as N group was not. A 5×2 factorial design, with types of self-instruction and the strength of temptation,(more attracte or less attractive) were used. The results clearly showed that task-facilitating self-instruction was significantly effective for children's resistance to temptation. That is, the task-relevant self-instruction inhibited to respond to the temptation reduced the time to deviate from the task, and facilitated the child's attention to the task. In the experiment II, the effects of overt self-instruction with different contents were examined. Furthermore, the generality of the ability of resistance to temptation was examined. Forty children, aged from 3 years 4 months to 5 years 1 month, were asked to verbalize self-instruction overtly, facing temptation. Four types of self-instruction were used, task-facilitating (TF group), temptation-inhibiting (TI group), reward-oriented (RO group) and irrelevant one (I group). N group Was not given any self-instructions. A 5×2 factorial desing, that varied the contents of self-instruction and the strength of the temptation was used. The procedure was almost the same as in, exp. I. Compared to the I group and N group, the subjects given task-relevant self-instruction showed greater resistance to the temptation significantly. And in experiment II, the results showed the tendency that irrelevant self-instruction was also effective for self-control. Although the statistical significance was not found between relevant and irrelevant self-instruction, these findings suggested that task-relevant self-instructions were more effective for resistance to temptation. These findings further suggested that there were two types of strategy for self-control in resistance to temptation: facilitate the subjectis attention to the task, and inhibit attention to the temptation. In the later test situation, the subjects who were given task-relevant self-instruction significantly reduced the time to deviate, but the relation between Exp. II and the test situation of each subject was low.