How do children learn to be kind, to share or help out or cooperate with others? Parents and other adults play a role in teaching these skills. But, to a great extent, children learn these positive social behaviors from each other.
The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget first pointed this out about 60 years ago. He said that adult-child interactions involve unequal roles. Adults have most of the control. Interactions between two children, however, are different. They involve more mutual, equal roles. This requires greater cooperation and give and take. Children can learn to obey a superior. From an equal they learn mutual cooperation, how to share, how to feel the other person's needs.
A research study by Dr. Nancy Eisenberg supports this idea. She studied 61 middle-class children, ages 3 to 5 years, in their preschool classrooms for 18 weeks. Whenever a child did what another adult or child asked, a researcher would ask him why he had done so.
For example, the teacher might ask Dwayne to help set the lunch table. Some time later, a classmate might ask Dwayne to share his playdough. In each case, Dwayne did what was asked. But researchers found that Dwayne did so for different reasons. With adults, the children were most likely to explain their behavior in terms of avoiding punishment or gaining approval of the powerful adult. With another child, the children were most likely to say that they were motivated by the needs of the other child, by friendship, or because they needed to solve a problem.
"It is possible that children often interpret adults' requests as commands," says Dr. Eisenberg. "Consequently, children frequently may believe that they are complying with adult's requests for external, authority/punishment-related reasons. With other children, on the other hand, the child feels they can decide whether or not to comply. The child has to think about reasons to comply. In this thinking process, children learn to empathize with others, to balance the needs of others with their own needs, and to think about what the right thing to do is. These are the beginnings of morals."
These findings show one reason that friends are so important to young children. Being around other children the same age is one of the benefits of a good child care program.
The findings also show the importance of letting children work at solving their own problems whenever possible. It is exactly by having to cooperate and negotiate with a peer that children develop the skills of moral, prosocial behavior.
A teacher must carefully assess each situation when it arises. In some cases, children will be able to solve the problem on their own. In other cases, however, the children will need some guidance from adults. In these cases, asking leading questions rather than telling the children what to do or solving the problem for them is often best.
For example, if two children are fighting over blocks, the provider might say, "Is there some way you could both use the blocks?" Given some time to think, the children may come up with several solutions. For example, they may decide to divide the blocks into two piles. They could decide to build a village together. Or they could decide to take turns with the blocks. By thinking of the solutions on their own, they are more likely to remember them and to use them again in the future.
Children will also be more likely in some situations than others to be able to solve problems on their own. For example, young children may find it easier to share when there are many blocks rather than only a few. And it is easier to share with only one other friend than to share with many friends.
By paying careful attention to how the environment is structured, providers can encourage children to regulate their own behavior and to learn from their interactions with other children.
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National Network for Child Care - NNCC. Part of CYFERNET, the National Extension Service
Children Youth and Family Educational Research Network. Permission is granted to reproduce
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Reprinted with permission from the National Network for Child Care - NNCC. Riley, D. (1995). Preschoolers learn kindness from each other. In Todd, C.M. (Ed.), *Child care connections*, 2(1), Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Cooperative Extension Service.
FORMAT AVAILABLE:: Internet DOCUMENT REVIEW :: Level 3 - National Peer Review ENTRY DATE:: May 1996
