The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  Seventh year through puberty “Industry versus inferiority”: Children are learning to be competent at activities that adults and peers value; when they are not, they feel inferior.

  Adolescence “Identity versus role confusion”: The primary task of adolescence is to establish a sense of personal identity as part of a social group. Failure to do this results in confusion about who they are and what they want to do in life.

  Young adult “Intimacy versus isolation”: The young adult develops the ability to give and receive love and make long-term commitments to relationships.

  Middle adulthood “Generativity versus stagnation”: At this stage of life, the adult takes an interest in guiding the development of the next generation.

  Older adulthood “Ego integrity versus despair”: The older adult develops a sense of acceptance toward life as it was lived and the importance of the relationships that were part of the individual’s life.

  According to Kegan, the second order of consciousness begins between approximately the ages of seven and ten when children are able to construct “durable categories.” The mental organization that characterizes durable categories means changing physical objects from being principally about one’s momentary perceptions of them to being about their having ongoing rules about what elements may be properties regardless of the individual’s perceptions. Children develop the ability to see that the phenomenon being considered (thing, other, self) has its own properties, which are elements of a class or category, and that all classes have durable rules regulating class membership. For example, an individual’s preferences, habits, and ability are aspects of the person in an ongoing way rather than a momentary desire. A child’s desires change from being primarily about her current impulses to being about ongoing, time-enduring needs or preferences, which may contain current wishes.

  Sense of Self.

  The sense of self acquired in early childhood must be further developed or revised to fit a new context in middle childhood. In addition to spending more time with other children and with far fewer adults involved, the child in the elementary classroom is primarily engaged in structured learning tasks. The change from an adult-centered to a peer-centered environment requires the child to reconcile the sense of self-identity acquired within the family context with the new self-concepts being formed as a consequence of different relationships. The child’s relationship with parents also changes as the parents begin to rely on discussion and explanation of cause and consequence to influence the child’s behavior.

  Bingham and Stryker (1995) suggest that the stages of social-emotional development for girls may differ somewhat from boys. They describe five stages of development for girls that parallel those posed by Erikson but differ in emphasis at sensitive time points. Through age eight, girls have the task of developing the hardy personality. Accomplishing this task means feeling in control of their own life, being committed to specific activities, and looking forward to challenging growth activities. Stage 2 finds the nine-through twelve-year-old forming an identity as an achiever. This involves developing a durable core of oneself as a person who is capable of accomplishment in a number of areas, such as intellectual, social, and so on. The stage of skill building for self-esteem occurs between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. Girls develop feelings of being worthy, entitled to assert their needs and wants, and confidence concerning the ability to cope with life. From ages seventeen to twenty-two, the task becomes creating strategies for self-sufficiency, both emotional and financial. Here, girls take on responsibility for taking care of themselves based on a sense of autonomy. The adult task is finding satisfaction in work and love and being content with personal accomplishments and social or personal relationships.

  Self-Conception and Motivation.

  Dweck (1996) has demonstrated that major patterns of adaptive or maladaptive behavior (such as a mastery orientation or a helplessness orientation to tasks) are affected by children’s implicit theories or self-conceptions about their ability. For example, some children believe their intelligence is a fixed entity; others believe it can be increased by effort. Those holding a fixed entity theory are oriented toward proving the adequacy of their performance in order to win approval of their intelligence. The latter group, adhering to an incremental effort theory, is more interested in pursuing learning goals whereby they can increase their ability. These children, who focus on controllable factors such as effort, are likely to persist when experiencing setback or failure. (For further discussion, see chapter 13.) Implicit motivational theories do not exist only in the intellectual realm; they are paralleled in social interaction as well. School adjustment depends on both social and academic goals and abilities: having prosocial goals and successful peer relationships is critical in promoting interest in and achievement in school.

  In addition to implicit theories about ability, several other factors influence the choice of a goal: its importance, the interpretation of an event (attribution), knowledge of strategies for reaching the goal, and environmental variables. For example, aggressive children are bound by the importance of control and dominance. They have more confidence than other children that they can master events involving aggression. In social situations, they interpret the actions of their peers, even when accidental or ambiguous, as being hostile; thus, the behavior of others becomes provocative and inspires a need for retaliation. Frequently these children lack strategies for interacting successfully with peers. They do not know that it is important to show interest in what a peer is doing or that they need to cooperate with others in playtime activities. Similarly, children who fear or experience rejection by others are caught up in the importance of avoiding rejection. These children are handicapped by a lack of group entry skills, such as knowing how to express interest in others’ activities and to suggest cooperative ways of joining the ongoing group process. Environmental variables refer primarily to the atmosphere established in the home or classroom and whether it promotes adaptive or maladaptive behavior.

  Parents, teachers, and other adults play a major role in determining what kind of theories children develop about their personality characteristics. They do this mainly in two ways. One is the implicit theories and explicit explanations that adults offer for their own behavior and personality; children imitate adults and internalize their explanations for their own behavior and personality. The second way is to explain the child’s behavior and personality characteristics. A parent who explains the child’s behavior by presumably fixed characteristics such as genes, ability, or temperament rather than malleable characteristics such as knowledge, effort, or mood often stimulates the child to use similar explanations. As previously stated, the type of theory that children develop about their personality and behavior greatly affects their academic learning and emotional development.

  Adults also need to consider the environmental or context variables that may be changed to help children, especially those who are socially isolated or aggressive. An effective way of doing this involves decreasing competition among children and promoting cooperative learning activities (Johnson and Johnson, 1991). In the classroom, structuring tasks so that children work cooperatively in small groups promotes common achievement goals and contributes to the motivation to learn through group acceptance and support. For optimal results, children require instruction and coaching in the various strategies that they can use to achieve their goals and benefit from multiple practice sessions.

  Self-Esteem.

  Social acceptance is an important goal of middle childhood. At this age, children become aware of their relative status among peers and have concerns about rejection. They also use gossip as a means of finding out about the group’s norms; once they know what their friends value and approve, they can shape their own behavior to achieve peer acceptance. Children already competent in group-entry skills achieve peer acceptance easily and are likely to resist unwelcome pressure from the group.

  There is evidence that social comparison affects a
child’s self-evaluation more strongly with increasing age. This fits well with the decreasing self-esteem that occurs during middle childhood as children begin to compare their performance with that of their peers and to define themselves accordingly. They also begin to think of the interpersonal implications of their own characteristics (“I always do my homework and know the answers in class, so other kids call me nerdy”).

  Children of all ages whose friendships have positive, cooperative features are high in self-esteem and prosocial behavior, are popular with peers, have few emotional problems, are well behaved, and experience good academic adjustment, including positive attitudes toward school. Despite greater reliance in middle childhood on peer opinion and values, parents remain an important influence on the child. In fact, high self-esteem has been linked to authoritative parenting. This approach to parenting includes a close, affectionate relationship that makes the child feel important; clearly defined limits and consequences for transgression, to give the child the sense that norms are real and significant; and respect for individuality, because the child needs to express individuality. Parents show respect for their children by reasoning with them and taking their point of view into account. The key to a child’s high self-esteem is the feeling, transmitted in large part by the family and valued teachers, that she has the ability to control her own future by controlling both herself and her environment.

  Conversely, a child with negative friendship relationships (characterized by rivalries and put-downs) is likely to be a low achiever both academically and socially. He also displays disruptive behavior and may suffer depression and anxiety. In contrast to a child with high self-esteem, this child is more likely to have had authoritarian or permissive parents and less parental acceptance, fewer clearly defined limits, and less respect for individuality. Low self-esteem may also result if a preadolescent fails at attempted tasks. Unlike younger children, a preadolescent is prone to attribute her failure to innate ability and not to situational factors such as effort. This failure experience results in reduced expectations for success, negative feelings, and low persistence (Dweck, 1996).

  Social Relationships.

  Around age ten or eleven, children change to a “social-relational moral perspective” (see table 18.2), wherein shared feelings and harmony with people close to them are more important than individual self-interest. This perspective marks the growth of an inclination and ability to interact with other children without adult supervision. One problem with this growing ability is that children now depend more on peers to define right and wrong and less on such authorities as parents and teachers.

  Friends influence children through their attitudes, behavior, and personal characteristics. The quality of the friendship is important: positive, mutually supportive, and cooperative relationships are, not surprisingly, more constructive than those characterized by put-downs and hostile rivalry.

  Poor grades and dropping out of school can frequently be traced to lack of social-emotional skills. Social competence and appropriate behavior are strong and consistent predictors of academic outcomes, and the social climate of the classroom appears to be a powerful motivator of academic as well as cooperative classroom behavior. In fact, social and emotional variables predict achievement as well as or better than intellectual ability, sensory deficits, or neurological factors (Horn and Packard, 1985). Research shows a strong link among social-emotional and conflict resolution skills, traditional intellectual skills (reading, writing, and math), and success in the adult workplace (Deutsch, 1993; Gardner, 1993; Goleman, 1998; Gottman, 1997; Jensen, 1998; Shore, 1997).

  The ability to develop friendships positively affects a child’s school adjustment in three ways:

  Attitude toward classes. Cooperative students value classes, teachers, and what they are learning.

  Classroom behavior. Cooperative students are rarely disruptive.

  Academic achievement. Cooperative students learn what is taught and receive high grades and test scores.

  Perspective Taking.

  With rule-based games, children must keep in mind the overall set of task conditions as well as engage in social perspective taking. Thus, they must take into consideration the wishes, thoughts, and actions of other children along with their own. At this age, children make inferences about the perspectives of other people and are aware that other people can do the same about them. But they often have difficulty in simultaneously focusing on their own perspective while trying to assume the perspective of another. As a result, they frequently adhere to the correctness of either their own view or that of an authority (adult or older child seen as an authority). Becoming skilled in negotiating conflictful social interactions with peers while playing a game depends on a child’s growing ability to understand how others think (social perspective taking) and feel (social-emotional competence).

  Cooperation.

  In middle childhood, children begin wrestling with such issues as morality and rules of fairness (see table 18.2). According to Kohlberg (1976), children around the age of seven or eight enter the stage of development called instrumental morality, or self-regulation, which includes cooperative behavior. In this sense, cooperating means working toward a common goal while coordinating one’s own feelings and perspective with another’s. The motive for cooperation is mutual affection and trust, which develops into the ability to take the perspective of another. Given that children may show characteristics of earlier stages of development depending on the circumstances, middle childhood youngsters may still have a somewhat egocentric point of view, in which they have difficulty distinguishing between their own interests and those of other children.

  Middle childhood also sees emerging belief in equity: if a group member works harder and contributes more to a project, that member is seen to be deserving of a greater share of the rewards. This is justice as an exchange system, in which you should receive as much as you can give. Sometimes the temptation of an appealing reward, however, causes even older children to attempt to get as much as they can from outcome without regard to how much they contribute (Damon, 1977).

  Self-Control.

  To encourage a child’s self-regulation, the goal of the adult (parent or teacher) should be to increasingly appeal to the child’s cooperation rather than obedience. Although adult-child relationships are not equal in power, an adult who respects the child’s thoughts, opinions, and endeavors can permit and encourage the child to think about and question causes, potential outcomes, and general explanations.

  The Role of Conflict

  If a relationship is threatened (on the playground, for example), preadolescents engage in fewer conflicts with friends than with acquaintances. However, in the classroom or places where continued interaction is not at risk, the preadolescent disagrees more with friends than nonfriends. The type of conflict most commonly occurring depends on gender: boys’ disagreements often involve power issues, whereas for girls, disagreements usually involve interpersonal matters. Children who are aggressive also engage in conflicts that differ according to gender: boys have goals of instrumentality (getting what they want, whether it be a material object or a privileged position) and dominance, whereas girls are likely to engage in relationship aggression: they are displaying behavior intended to damage another child’s friendship or feeling of inclusion by the peer group.

  Preadolescents commonly believe that one person is responsible for any given conflict, and they feel that resolution should come from that person. Thus, it becomes important for adults to engage both (or all) participants in a dispute in what Shure and Spivack (1978) refer to as problem-solving dialoguing—a form of questioning, similar to scaffolding, that helps a child develop an alternative solution and consequential thinking. This process results in clearly defining the problem, searching for the original problem (one child’s version of the conflict may not include the first action that occurred), and emphasizing the child’s ability (not the adult’s) to solve the problem.

  A w
ell-respected conflict resolution program widely used with children in middle childhood was developed by Creative Response to Conflict (CRC) in Nyack, New York.1 CRC employs age-appropriate classroom activities in five thematic areas: affirmation, communication, cooperation, problem solving, and bias awareness. In addition, it emphasizes the importance of actively training and involving school staff, parents, and other community members as part of a holistic approach to changing culture and climate.

  For children in the middle years, advances in development allow the use of more complex and collaborative approaches to skill development than those developed at a younger age—for instance, asking students to respond to a conflict scenario by brainstorming and problem solving in cooperative groups. Unlike young children, who have trouble stepping outside their own identities, middle-years children can engage easily and independently in role plays, which require them to separate their own thoughts and actions from those of the characters they play.

  This movement away from egocentrism also makes the middle years a time when children can be introduced to mediation. CRC trains children beginning in the third grade to be peer mediators who help other children work out conflicts in the playground. Solutions to conflict are not imposed; rather, mediators help disputants work out their own agreements. This approach, which promotes perspective-taking and problem-solving skills, is particularly successful with middle-years students because it meshes with their growing reliance on peers for affirmation and their need for autonomy and self-direction. (For further information on peer mediation programs, I highly recommend Jones and Compton, 2003.)