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Article Excerpt
It is now well established that children's social cognitive development is closely related to aspects of their social experience (for reviews see, for example, Carpendale & Lewis, 2004, 2006). Although the focus of much of this research has been on children's understanding that beliefs can be false, which is considered an essential aspect of an understanding of mind (e.g. Perner, 1991), some researchers have investigated later developing social cognitive transitions such as coming to an interpretive understanding of beliefs (e.g. Carpendale & Chandler, 1996; Lalonde & Chandler, 2002). Other bodies of research have investigated children's understanding of emotions (e.g. Denham, 1998), and some have considered social understanding as constituted by an understanding of both emotion and belief (e.g. Dunn, Brown, Slomkowki, Tesla, & Youngblade, 1991).
There is growing consensus that aspects of the relationships that children experience such as parenting (Hughes, Deater-Deckard, & Cutting, 1999; Pears & Moses, 2003; Ruffman, Perner, & Parkin, 1999; Vinden, 2001), as well as family discourse about the psychological world are associated with advanced understanding of belief and emotion (Dunn et al., 1991; Moore, Furrow, Chiasson, & Patriquin, 1994) and may play a causal role in the development of children's social understanding (Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002). This sort of evidence has led to a great deal of debate concerning what it is about social interaction and family talk about mind and emotions that facilitates the development of social understanding (Astington & Baird, 2005; Carpendale & Lewis, 2004, 2006; Harris, 2005; Lohmann & Tomasello, 2003; Nelson, 1996; Nelson et al., 2003; Racine, 2004; Racine & Carpendale, in press; Turnbull & Carpendale, 1999).
Disciplinary situations involving conflict between children are one context in which family talk may play an important role in social cognitive development. Ruffman and colleagues (1999) used a questionnaire to ask parents what they had done or would do in five different disciplinary situations. They found that parents who reported that they would ask their child to reflect on the feelings of others in disciplinary situations had children who were more advanced in false belief understanding than their age-mates. Dunn and colleagues (1991) have also suggested that disciplinary situations often expose children to conflicting perspectives that might facilitate their understanding of false beliefs and emotions. However, in order to benefit from witnessing conflict, children would presumably need to understand such situations. We suggest that one way in which children learn about conflict is within conversation. Further, we propose that social interaction is beneficial for social development to the extent that such interaction facilitates children's understanding of particular social situations (Carpendale & Lewis, 2004; Carpendale, Lewis, Muller, & Racine, 2005; Racine, 2004; Turnbull, 2003; Turnbull & Carpendale, 1999, 2001).
To assess this proposal, following Ruffman and colleagues (1999), we focus on the different ways that parents and their young children talk about disciplinary situations. One limitation of Ruffman et al.'s study, acknowledged by the authors, is a reliance on parental self-reports. In another study on the role of parenting in social cognitive development Hughes et al. (1999) utilized both observational and self-report measures of parenting, but these yielded conflicting results. In further research on this topic, rather than assessing general attitudes, Pears and Moses (2003) utilized a self-report measure on specific parenting practices during only the preceding 24 hours (the Parent Daily Report, Chamberlain & Reid, 1987). Still, social desirability in the above cases is a concern, and even if parents were being totally honest they still might not know how they would respond to their children in particular situations or remember exactly how they did respond and thus not be able to complete their report accurately.
In order to build upon and extend Ruffman et al.'s study, we designed the present study to overcome this limitation by examining actual discussions between parents and their 3- to 5-year-old children. Unlike Hughes et al. (1999), our study is not concerned with observation of a general parental disciplinary style, but rather with the details of parent-child talk about a disciplinary situation and its relation to children's social development. Like Dunn and colleagues (1991), we conceive of social understanding in a broader sense than Ruffman and colleagues (1999) in that in addition to assessing children's understanding of beliefs and we also assess their understanding of emotions in relation to conflict. In particular, we investigate whether dyads differ in the extent to which their talk seems helpful for learning about a specific conflict situation. In the same way that Hughes and colleagues assume that a measure of parenting style reflects something about the way in which parent and child interact, we assume that a sample of parent-child talk reflects something about the dyad's typical interaction.
In conceptualizing forms of talk and relationships in terms of whether or not they facilitate development by helping children understand situations, we draw on Piaget's, (1932/1965, 1977/1995) distinction between constraint and cooperation. According to Piaget, relationships of constraint are based on an imbalance of power and one-sided respect. This means that parents may not feel obliged to fully explain the reasons for their position and can simply imposes their own point of view. In contrast, cooperative relationships are characterized by mutual respect and therefore parents will be motivated to achieve mutual understanding by fully explaining their position and attempting to understand the child's views. Piaget argued that this form of relationship is best suited for the achievement of mutual understanding and the developmental of knowledge. We suggest that this is a fruitful framework within which to understand the work of Ruffman and colleagues (1999) and Dunn and colleagues (1991). Such a framework could also be applied to other aspects of the parent-child relationship. To give one example, reported relations between high and low elaborative parental talk and children's autobiographical memory could be seen in this light (see, for example, Nelson & Fivush, 2004). That is, cooperative relationships may be typified by elaborative talk, whereas constraining relations may be typified by non-elaborative talk.
There are, of course, different ways to assess parent-child talk and the nature of relationships. One approach is in-home observation. This has the advantage of naturalistic observation but the disadvantage that families would talk about different events. We argue that it is important that all the parent-child dyads talk about the same conflict because this reduces variability in parental response due to the varying nature of disciplinary situations. We therefore asked dyads to discuss the same series of drawings presented as a wordless picture book depicting a conflict between two siblings and their mother's intervention. Thus, all dyads talked about the same event but because they were not constrained by text in the book it was possible to examine their different ways of construing the event and its resolution. We could accordingly compare families' different ways of dealing with a disciplinary situation with the child's independent performance on tests of social understanding.
We examined aspects of the talk that might facilitate understanding of the conflict. Specifically, we distinguished forms of talk that directed attention to the actions that generated the conflict from talk that seemed to simply involve telling the child what should be done without necessarily leading the child to a more complete appreciation of the conflict. The first form of talk we refer to as explanatory talk, which is talk that directs attention to the intentions and motivation and consequences of the actions that generated the conflict. We argue that this form of talk reflects a cooperative relationship in that it shows an attempt to help the child understand the psychological context of the conflict. For example, saying that it...
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