This article presents conclusions that have emerged from my recent work on how children choose strategies on familiar tasks such as arithmetic, time‐telling, and spelling. Among these conclusions are that children use diverse strategies on many tasks; that ignoring this diversity of strategies can lead to seriously flawed cognitive models; that children's pattern of strategy choices have considerable adaptive value; that children's strategy choices do not always reflect the operation of metacognitive processes; that associative knowledge directs at least some strategy choices; that among the factors that influence the development of strategy choices are the difficulty of executing backup strategies, the impact of related problems and operations, and the frequency of problem presentation; and that individual differences in both knowledge and cognitive style influence strategy choices.