Children’s Developing Understanding of the Conventionality of Rules

Much research has investigated how children relate to norms taught to them by adult authorities. Very few studies have investigated norms that arise out of children’s own peer interactions. In two studies, we investigated how 5- and 7-year-old children teach, enforce, and understand rules that they either created themselves or were taught by an adult. Children (N = 240) were asked to either invent game rules on their own or were taught these exact same rules by an adult (yoked design). Children of both ages enforced and transmitted the rules in a normative way, regardless of whether they had invented them or were taught the rules by an adult, suggesting that they viewed even their own self-made rules as normatively binding. However, creating the rules led 5-year-old children to understand them as much more changeable as compared with adult-taught rules. Seven-year-olds, in contrast, regarded both kinds of rules as equally changeable, indeed allowing fewer changes to their self-created rules than 5-year-olds. While the process of creating rules seemed to enlighten preschoolers’ understanding of the conventionality of the rules, school-aged children regarded both self-created rules and adult-taught rules in a similar manner, suggesting a deeper understanding of rule normativity as arising from social agreement and commitment.     

Emotional Bonds with Parents, Emotion Regulation, and School-Related Behavior Problems Among Elementary School Truants

Among juvenile status offenses, truancy represents the largest share of juvenile court caseloads. As a marker of risk, truancy is important because of its associations with school disengagement, drop-out, and developmental trajectories that include various forms of delinquency and anti-social behavior. Better understanding of the developmental circumstances and needs of truant children may point the way to more effective intervention strategies. Much accumulated research has shown strong associations between the emergence of juvenile delinquency and qualities of caregiving in parent–child relationships. Child-parent attachment in particular has been identified as an important developmental foundation of the child-parent relationship. We used a multi-informant approach to examine associations between children’s self-reported perceptions of attachment security (using the Security Scales), their emotion regulation (reported by parents on the Emotion Regulation Checklist), and school-related behavior problems (as reported by teachers with the Child Behavior Checklist), among 74 elementary school-aged truant children (mean age 9 years). Children and families were recruited through a truancy intervention program in a state in the deep South in the U.S. Data were analyzed via hierarchical multiple regression. Parents’ reports of their children’s emotion regulation predicted behavior problems as reported by teachers. Children’s own reports of their emotional bonds with parents were somewhat less predictive of emotion regulation and behavior problems. Implications for truancy intervention programs for high-risk elementary school children include more focused attention to the importance of children’s developing capacities for emotion regulation and the child-parent bond.     

Children’s and Adolescents’ Conceptions of Happiness

Previous research on children’s and adolescents’ happiness has mainly focused on the different variables that may contribute to it. However, very few studies have investigated the beliefs that children and adolescents hold about happiness. It is important to study developmental and gender differences in the conceptions of happiness as beliefs affect people’s emotions and behaviors, and they may help explain how children and adolescents strive for their own (and potentially others’) happiness. To that aim, we conducted two different studies. In Study 1a 20 people (lay judges) completed two categorization tasks to obtain categorization systems that may include all the relevant content categories identified in previous literature with adults, adolescents and children. In Study 1b, we asked 162 children and adolescents to define—in their own words—what happiness meant for them. Their responses were coded according to two different systems derived from previous finding with adults and children and to an alternative coding system derived from the qualitative analyses of children’s and adolescents’ responses. Overall, results showed that hedonic conceptualization of happiness were mainly present in late childhood; whereas eudaimonic conceptualizations were mainly present in adolescence. No significant gender differences were found.     

The Philosophy for Children Curriculum: Resisting ‘Teacher Proof’ Texts and the Formation of the Ideal Philosopher Child

The philosophy for children curriculum was specially written by Matthew Lipman and colleagues for the teaching of philosophy by non-philosophically educated teachers from foundation phase to further education colleges. In this article I argue that such a curriculum is neither a necessary, not a sufficient condition for the teaching of philosophical thinking. The philosophical knowledge and pedagogical tact of the teacher remains salient, in that the open-ended and unpredictable nature of philosophical enquiry demands of teachers to think in the moment and draw on their own knowledge and experience of academic philosophy. Providing specialist training or induction in the P4C curriculum cannot and should not replace undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in academic philosophy at universities. However, although for academic philosophers the use of the P4C curriculum could be beneficial, I will argue that its use poses the risk of wanting to form children into the ideal ‘abnormal’ child, the thinking child—the adult philosopher’s child positioned as such by the Lipman novels. The notion of narrativity is central in my argument. With the help of two picturebooks—The Three Pigs (2001) by David Weisner and Voices in the Park (1998) by Anthony Browne—I illustrate my claim that philosophy as ‘side-shadowing’ or meta-thinking can only be generated in the space ‘in between’ text, child and educator, thereby foregrounding a ‘pedagogy of exposure’ (Biesta 2011) rather than ‘teacher proof’ texts.     

儿童情绪胜任力的研究进展：概念、功能与干预措施

儿童情绪胜任力是指儿童拥有情绪知识,对自身和他人的情绪进行识别和理解,并调节和表达自身情绪的一种综合能力,它在提高儿童的认知能力、促进其身心健康发展、提高社会交往能力以及减少儿童危险行为等方面都有重要作用。研究者开展了以儿童情绪和行为问题改善、压力应对能力提高及情绪识别和管理能力提升为目标的干预项目。未来可进一步探究学校、老师、同伴及儿童自身的人格特点等对其情绪胜任力发展的影响及作用机制,并可从增加个性化干预及提升干预长期效果等视角进一步完善干预措施。     

Every Child Still Matters: interdisciplinary approaches to the spirituality of the child

Abstract

Ten years ago, I was a researcher with the Evaluation of Children’s Trusts which examined a key aspect of U.K. government policy, Every Child Matters. Every Child Matters was partly a response to Lord Laming’s 2003 report into the murder of 8-year old Victoria Climbié, which concluded that children’s services needed to be better integrated to avoid such tragedies in the future. Children’s Trusts were regional hubs, set-up across England to facilitate integrated professional practice; but Every Child Matters was bigger than this because it set out a policy vision for rethinking the child as a whole person. At the time, I was struck by the absence of any reference to spirituality in this new holistic view of the child, and this led me to write an article which was published in 2006 entitled, ‘Every Child Matters and children’s spiritual rights: does the new holistic approach to children’s care address children’s spiritual well-being?’.

This article was originally a keynote talk at the 2016 International Conference on Children’s Spirituality with the theme Spirituality and the whole child: interdisciplinary approaches, and this provided the opportunity both to see where we are now with integrated working for children and young people more generally, and to focus our attention on interdisciplinary approaches to children’s spirituality and the whole child in particular. The article begins by summarising some of the current thinking spirituality, the whole child and interdisciplinary working. The article then goes on to consider a long-standing concern of mine, and one which was highlighted in my 2006 article, which is what we intend to mean – collectively, as academics and professional practitioners concerned with children’s (and adults’) spirituality – when we use the term ‘spirituality’ in the professional context. In my view, it is time to stop stating that spirituality is hard to define, and come to an agreement about what we mean when we use it. Interdisciplinary approaches to children’s (and adults’) spirituality, and holistic approaches to the child (and adult), will not be successful unless there is a clear, shared agreement about what we mean, and the article ends with suggestions for ways forward.     

Prior experiences and perceived efficacy influence 3-year-olds' imitation

Children are selective and flexible imitators. They combine their own prior experiences and the perceived causal efficacy of the model to determine whether and what to imitate. In Experiment 1, children were randomly assigned to have either a difficult or an easy experience achieving a goal. They then saw an adult use novel means to achieve the goal. Children with a difficult prior experience were more likely to imitate the adult's precise means. Experiment 2 showed further selectivity--children preferentially imitated causally efficacious versus nonefficacious acts. In Experiment 3, even after an easy prior experience led children to think their own means would be effective, they still encoded the novel means performed by the model. When a subsequent manipulation rendered the children's means ineffective, children recalled and imitated the model's means. The research shows that children integrate information from their own prior interventions and their observations of others to guide their imitation.     

“Big Organisations” Supporting “Small Involvement”: Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina on Enabling Community-Based Participation of Children Through PAR

The article presents the process and the outcomes of child participatory action research (PAR) conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), as part of UNICEF activities in this country. The study was implemented through children acting as co-researchers, organised in so-called Children’s PAR Groups, initiated in three BiH municipalities. Children collaborated with a Support Group in each of the municipalities, comprised of adults who helped children implement their activities. Children chose to focus their research on community participation and ensured a number of outcomes in a relatively brief period. The value of PAR in the development of child participation was highlighted by children and adults who took part in the study. Prejudices that children have toward adults, and vice versa, were issues identified as main barriers for wider children’s participation. This article also reviews a number of ethical challenges highlighted in the study, such as the organisational barriers to children’s participation and project-based support for its development.     

Developing spirituality – an equal right of every child?

ABSTRACT

Children’s spiritual development is influenced by those with whom they interact and by the world around them. An important context for young children is the kindergarten, which has a high level of responsibility for their (spiritual) education. At kindergarten children encounter people with different religious and spiritual attitudes, which may be fundamental to the development of their own spirituality. Research results regarding how two kindergartens in Austria deal with this diversity and how children address it are summarized. One result of this qualitative ethnographic research project is that, depending on their religion, children have different opportunities to develop their spiritual communication and spirituality based on religious traditions and rituals. Developing kindergartens in line with the metaphor of safe spaces where diversity is recognized and discussed can contribute to the creation of equal opportunities for children’s spiritual development.     

The origins of belief representation: Monkeys fail to automatically represent others’ beliefs

Young infants’ successful performance on false belief tasks has led several researchers to argue that there may be a core knowledge system for representing the beliefs of other agents, emerging early in human development and constraining automatic belief processing into adulthood. One way to investigate this purported core belief representation system is to examine whether non-human primates share such a system. Although non-human primates have historically performed poorly on false belief tasks that require executive function capacities, little work has explored how primates perform on more automatic measures of belief processing. To get at this issue, we modified Kovács et al. (2010)’s test of automatic belief representation to examine whether one non-human primate species—the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta)—is automatically influenced by another agent’s beliefs when tracking an object’s location. Monkeys saw an event in which a human agent watched an apple move back and forth between two boxes and an outcome in which one box was revealed to be empty. By occluding segments of the apple’s movement from either the monkey or the agent, we manipulated both the monkeys’ belief (true or false) and agent’s belief (true or false) about the final location of the apple. We found that monkeys looked longer at events that violated their own beliefs than at events that were consistent with their beliefs. In contrast to human infants, however, monkeys’ expectations were not influenced by another agent’s beliefs, suggesting that belief representation may be an aspect of core knowledge unique to humans.     

幼儿生气和伤心情绪情景理解

考察三类成人（113名幼儿母亲、42名幼儿教师、221名大学生）对西方研究者常用的22个生气和伤心情景中幼儿情绪的推断;以中国成人的情绪情景理解为标准,进一步考察120名4-6岁幼儿生气和伤心情景理解能力的发展。结果表明：三类成人一致推断的6个生气情景和6个伤心情景,与西方研究者的界定基本一致;幼儿的伤心情景理解能力显著高于生气情景理解能力;4岁幼儿的伤心情景理解能力显著低于5岁和6岁幼儿     

Comparing stuttering attitudes of preschool through 5th grade children and their parents in a predominately rural Appalachian sample

BackgroundTheories relating to young children’s social cognitive maturity and their prevailing social groups play important roles in the acquisition of attitudes. Previous research has shown that preschool and kindergarten children’s stuttering attitudes are characterized by stronger negative beliefs and self reactions than those of parents. By contrast, 12 year-old children’s stuttering attitudes have been shown to be similar to their parents’ attitudes. Other research indicates that parental stuttering attitudes are no different from attitudes of adults who are not parents.PurposeThe purpose of this study was to explore children’s stuttering attitudes of preschool through 5th grade children and to compare them to their parents’ attitudes.MethodChildren and parents from a rural Appalachian elementary school and child/parent pairs from other areas in the region responded to child and adult versions of the Public Opinion Survey of Human Attributes–Stuttering (POSHA–S/Child and POSHA–S). Seven grade levels were included: preschool, kindergarten, 1^st grade, 2^nd grade, 3^rd grade, 4^th grade, and 5^th grade.ResultsConfirming earlier research, younger children’s attitudes toward stuttering were considerably less positive than those of their parents. As children matured up to the fifth grade, however, their stuttering attitudes progressively were more positive. Parents’ stuttering attitudes were quite consistent across all seven grade levels.ConclusionsConsistent with theories of attitudinal development, between the ages of 4 and 11 years, children’s measured attitudes toward stuttering improved and gradually approximated the attitudes of their parents and the general public.     

Mechanisms Mediating Children’s Perceived Maternal Nonsupportive Reactions to Sadness and Children’s Social and Emotional Functioning

This study examined whether children’s perceptions of maternal nonsupportive reactions to sadness (active discouragement and non-response) influenced children’s loneliness and classroom popularity indirectly through their effects on children’s sadness inhibition and self-perception of social competence. Participants were children in grades 3–6 from a university affiliated public elementary school (N = 175; 53 % females; 37 % racial/ethnic minority). Children reported on the frequency of their mother’s active discouragement and non-response of their sadness, as well their own sadness inhibition, self-perceived social competence, and loneliness. Classroom peers reported on children’s popularity. Results indicated that perceived maternal non-response to sadness was indirectly related to classroom popularity and loneliness through the effect on children’s self-perception of social competence. In contrast, perceived maternal active discouragement of sadness was indirectly related to children’s classroom popularity through the effect on children’s sadness inhibition. These results support the consideration of active discouragement and non-response as distinct constructs and indicate the likelihood of different pathways of influence in predicting emotional and social outcomes such as loneliness and classroom popularity.     

‘You can’t buy love’: trivializing and the challenge for religious education

While there has been an increase in empirical research which explores the spirituality of children, few studies have explicitly named and described factors which may inhibit children’s expression of their spirituality. This paper, emanating from the author’s own research into children’s spirituality in Australian Catholic primary schools, presents and describes one such factor, which has been termed trivializing. An example of hermeneutic phenomenological writing—the text—in which trivializing was revealed is presented, followed by a reflection upon the text guided by van Manen’s lifeworld existentials (lived body, lived time, lived space, lived human relations). In the light of this reflection some initial implications for nurturing the spirituality of children within the primary religious education classroom are presented.     

Learning how to help others: Two-year-olds’ social learning of a prosocial act

Engaging in prosocial behaviors (acts that benefit others) is associated with many positive outcomes in children, including the development of positive peer relationships, academic achievement, and good psychological functioning. This study examined the social learning mechanisms toddlers use to acquire prosocial behaviors. This brief report presents a new experimental procedure in which 2-year-olds (28–32 months, N = 30) saw a video of an adult performing a novel prosocial behavior in response to another person’s distress. Children then had the opportunity to imitate and implement the behavior in response to their own parent’s physical distress. Children who saw the video were more likely to perform the novel action and to display non-demonstrated prosocial behaviors relative to (a) children who did not view the video but saw a parent in distress and (b) children who saw the video but witnessed their mother engage in a neutral activity. These results suggest that toddlers imitate and emulate prosocial behaviors for social interaction and that children can apply such behaviors in appropriate situations.     

The Management of Disclosure in Children’s Accounts of Domestic Violence: Practices of Telling and Not Telling

Children and young people who experience domestic violence are often represented as passive witnesses, too vulnerable to tell the stories of their own lives. This article reports on findings from a 2 year European research project (Understanding Agency and Resistance Strategies, UNARS) with children and young people in Greece, Italy, Spain and the UK, who had experienced domestic violence. It explores children and young people’s understandings of their own capacity to reflect on and disclose their experiences Extracts from individual interviews with 107 children and young people (age 8–18) were analysed. Three themes are presented, that illustrate children and young people’s strategies for managing disclosure: (1) “Being silenced or choosing silence?”, explores children and young people’s practices of self-silencing; (2) “Managing disclosures: Finding ways to tell” outlines how children and young people value self-expression, and the strategies they use to disclose safely; and in (3) “Speaking with many voices” considers how children and young people’s accounts of their experiences are constituted relationally, and are often polyvocal. The article concludes that children and young people can be articulate, strategic and reflexive communicators, and that good support for families struggling with domestic violence must enable space for children and young people’s voice to be heard. This is possible only in an integrated framework able to encompass multiple layers and perspectives, rather than privileging the adult point of view. Practitioners who work with families affected by domestic violence need to recognize that children and young people are able to reflect on and speak about their experiences. This requires that attention is paid to the complexity of children and young people’s communication practices, and the relational context of those communications.     

Examining the Regulatory and Reactive Temperamental Characteristics as Predictors of Low Income Preschool Children’s Executive Function

The current study is an examination of low income children’s reactive and regulatory temperamental characteristics as predictors of their executive function, with a particular focus on children’s regulatory temperament (i.e., inhibitory control and attentional focusing) as moderators of associations between reactive temperament (i.e., negative emotionality) and executive function. Participants were 291 children (159 boys) ages 37 to 70 months (M = 53.88 months, SD = 6.44 months) enrolled in 17 classrooms within 3 different preschools serving low income children in two Midwestern cities in the United States. Temperament was assessed via parent report during Fall 2014, and executive function were assessed via structured tasks implemented by independent researchers during Spring and Summer 2015. SAS PROC MIXED was used to test hierarchical regression models of children nested within classrooms. After controlling for child age, gender, ethnicity, and parent education, regulatory temperament moderated the association between reactive temperament and executive function. Children’s reactive temperament was inversely associated with their executive function. These findings suggest that understanding children’s regulatory and reactive temperamental characteristics may help to improve their executive functioning in early childhood.     

Can I Reach That Sticker? Preschoolers' Practical Judgments About Their Own and Others’ Body Size

Research to date has focused mostly on children's representation of their physical self as a prelude to the development of a theory of mind (ToM) and on their understanding of the self as distinct from others over time. Whether children approaching the well-known age of ToM mastery are also accurately appraising their own body's functional relationship to the everyday environment remains largely an unanswered question. Little work has investigated typical preschool-age children's explicit accuracy when making judgments about their own body's proportions. In the current study, 98 preschoolers made 16 practical judgments about whether their own body or an experimenter's body could fit through an apparatus (half of the apparatuses were 30% smaller than the body in question, and half were 30% larger). Overall, accuracy increased with age but was unrelated to body size. Children in all age groups performed above chance, and accuracy did not differ depending on target (e.g., self or other). Children in a comparison condition judging fit of inanimate objects (n = 23) performed similarly, though showed less evidence of “yes” bias, and there were no age-based differences in accuracy. Results are discussed with regard to preschoolers’ developing body awareness, as are implications for research protocols in which children are asked to accurately identify their own body size and shape from an array.     

儿童道德义愤的发展及其对第三方公正行为的影响

为了探讨儿童道德义愤的发展及其对第三方公正行为的影响，实验1考察106名幼儿园大班、小学2年级和4年级儿童的道德义愤在年级以及数目和价值不公平分配上的差异；实验2考察57名小学儿童在有无代价条件下，其道德义愤对第三方公正行为的影响。结果表明：儿童的道德义愤呈现随年级增长而不断增强的趋势；儿童由数目不公平分配引发的道德义愤得分显著高于价值不公平分配；幼儿园大班和2年级儿童在数目不公平分配中的道德义愤得分均显著高于价值不公平分配，而4年级儿童在数目和价值不公平分配中的道德义愤得分不存在显著差异；诱发道德义愤的儿童更多地做出第三方公正行为，并且更愿意选择补偿受害者；在不同诱发道德义愤条件下，是否需要付出代价都不会影响儿童的第三方公正行为。研究说明儿童的道德义愤随年级增长而发展，并影响第三方公正行为。     

Does syntax play a role in Theory of Mind development before the age of 3 years?

Language plays an important role in Theory of Mind development. Specifically, longitudinal and training studies indicate that the acquisition of complement syntax has an effect on three- to five-year-old children’s mastery of the concept of false belief. There is evidence for both a beginning explicit understanding of the mind and mastery of complement syntax in children before their third birthday. In the present study, we investigated longitudinally whether an early sensitivity to complement syntax is related to early development of Theory of Mind abilities in a sample of N = 159 German-speaking 27- to 36-month-old children. Children’s sensitivity to formal properties of complement syntax at 33 months was associated with their perspective-taking skills and their metacognition of own ignorance three months later. This relation remained significant when controlling for the effects of general language abilities. Furthermore, children’s sensitivity to complement syntax was concurrently related to their early false belief understanding. These findings support the view that complement syntax shares representational demands with an understanding of epistemic states and that language begins to support the acquisition of epistemic concepts earlier than was previously thought.