Être mère dans la famille recomposée : défis de la conciliation des rôles de belle-mère et de mère biologique

This study examines issues related to occupying both the role of stepmother and biological mother in a stepfamily. A sample of twelve participants was interviewed. The central theme of the interviews concerned the psychological state of the women as they tried to reconcile their biological maternity with their role as a stepmother. A qualitative analysis of the interviews enabled us to propose three themes emerging from their experience: a) a comparison of their different parental roles in the stepfamily; b) the issues related to managing stepfamily dynamics; c) the challenges linked to the development of a family identity.     

Généralisation de propriétés biologiques, physiques et comportementales chez l’enfant de cinq à neuf ans

This study is designed to examine how biological knowledge is organized and structured in children. Five- to nine-year-old children's interpretations of biological phenomena are studied by examining to what extent the transmission of different kinds of properties is perceived as being causally related to birth origins. A property generalization task is used, in which biological relations (birth origins) are pitted against adoptive relations. The characteristics to be generalized correspond to non-obvious biological characteristics, visible physic characteristics or behavioural characteristics. Our results show that five-year-old children do not understand the origin of these characteristics. A conceptual change seems to be at work by the age of seven but the delimitation of biological categories remains imperfect.     

Conceptions naïves de la mort des végétaux entre six et dix ans

This paper presents results of a study about the knowledge of plants’ death from 40 children of six and ten year-old. Three kinds of measures were available: questions about plants’ death according to typicality, free questions on causes of death and attributions of several kinds of explanations (intentional, teleological, vitalistic and essentialist). Results validated almost all our hypotheses, because typicality appeared to have an influence on the generalisation of death, and young children had more a vitalistic thinking more linked to feeding then essentialism which is more abstract. Such a way of reasoning was most frequent in older children. This kind of study belongs to a current theoretical approach of conceptual development.