Conflict Between Peers In Infancy_2008 - CiteSeerX

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researchers suppose that young children fight mainly over the possession of objects. In a ... 3. Introduction. Social conflict between children is an active and fruitful area of research. .... In most of the families (89%) both parents had full- or part-time jobs. ... were involved in conflicts at T1; 10 (36%) at T2; and 17 (61%) at T3.
Conflict between Peers in Infancy and Toddler Age: What Do They Fight about? Authors and affiliations Batya Licht, PhD. Marie Meierhofer Institute, Zurich, Switzerland Department of developmental Psychology, University of Berne, Switzerland Research interests: children’s conflict behavior, family stress and family relations, young children’s social behavior Heidi Simoni, PhD. Marie Meierhofer Institute, Zurich, Switzerland Head of the Marie Meierhofer Institute for early child education and welfare; Research interests: early development, young children’s social behavior, resilience, families in transition Pasqualina Perrig-Chiello, PhD. Department of developmental Psychology, University of Berne, Switzerland Professor, developmental psychology, University of Berne; Research interests: life span development, gender and personality development Corresponding author Batya Licht Bellariastr. 52 8038 Zurich Switzerland Phone: ++ 41 – 44 – 481 99 79 e-mail: [email protected]

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Abstract Although much psychological research has been conducted on children’s conflicts with peers from as young as one year, very little attention has been paid to the question of the motivation underlying these conflicts. Nevertheless, what a child tries to achieve in a conflict can be highly relevant for understanding his conflict behavior, conflict resolution strategies, manner of coping with the outcome of conflicts, and impact of pedagogical intervention. Most researchers suppose that young children fight mainly over the possession of objects. In a longitudinal study, children were filmed during free play in daycare centers at ages 8, 14, and 22 months. Analyzing the film material employing qualitative methods, we identified two different motivational themes at 8 months and an increasing variety of motivational issues at 14 and 22 months. We found that the earliest manifested and consistently dominant motivation is the need to explore, not to possess.

Keywords Infants, toddlers, conflict behavior, motivation, peers, exploration

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Introduction Social conflict between children is an active and fruitful area of research. As defined by Shantz (1987, p. 284), social conflict is a “state…[that] denotes incompatible behaviors or goals. The incompatibility is expressed when one person overtly opposes another person’s actions or statements.” Conflicting interests are a normal social phenomenon that unavoidably emerges when individuals come together. This holds true for children as well as adults. However, it is important to note that conflicts among children are not necessarily aggressive, nor are they equivalent to antisocial behavior. Indeed, the child’s primary goal is not to harm his or her opponent, but to defend his or her own goals and interests and to overcome the resistance of the other child. Theoreticians have pointed out the importance of such conflicts to the development of social competence, e.g., gaining an understanding of other people’s feelings and intentions, learning social rules and relationships, and developing social strategies for everyday life. Conflicts between children also contribute to identity development and an understanding of the self, as well as to the development of language (Eckerman and Didow 1996). Numerous scholars have argued that social conflict with peers fosters children’s individual and social development, is an important aspect of their evolving intersubjective capabilities, and helps them develop the capacity for cooperation, group formation, and the common use of resources (Brenner and Mueller 1982b; Damon 1977, 1983; Dunn and Slomkowski 1992; Emery 1992; Erikson 1959; Hartup 1992; Katz, Kramer and Gottman 1992; Piaget 1965 / 1932, 1966; Ross and Conant 1992; Shantz 1987; Shantz and Hobart 1989; Sullivan 1953). Moreover, empirical studies have demonstrated a variety of interesting correlations between assorted conflict behavior strategies and resolution skills (such as aggression), on the one hand, and social popularity, social competence, development, and social relationship skills, on the other (see Putallaz and Sheppard 1992 for a review). Meanwhile, pedagogical studies of social conflict among children have questioned common

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educational methods and examined the success or failure of adult intervention (Bayer, Whaley and May 1995; Bryant and Budd 1984; Chen 1999; Dittrich, Doerfler and Schneider 2001). Depending on the individual child’s specific goals, one could reasonably expect that his or her choice of strategy and willingness to fight or compromise, as well as the impact of any pedagogical intervention, might vary greatly. Thus it is surprising that so little attention has been devoted to the question of the child’s motivation, which is the catalyst for every behavior and therefore the key to understanding it. Although some motivation-related questions have been examined (e.g., whether the subject of the conflict is social; (Hay and Ross 1982; Trevarthen and Logotheti 1989), thorough study of this kind has not yet been conducted for infants and toddlers, and even for older children it is still very rare (e.g. Dittrich et al. 2001). The current literature goes no further than identifying general distinguishing aspects of conflict such as whether its character is social or nonsocial. (e.g. Caplan, Vespo, Pedersen and Hay 1991; Coser 1956; Hay and Ross 1982). Hay and Ross’ landmark study (1982) contributed significantly to departing from the notion of a dichotomy of conflicts among toddlers as either social-oriented or object-centered. Working from these results we believe that regardless of the child’s current goal, there is no doubt about the social character of any conflict interaction. Another common interpretation is that conflicts between children, even at the very young age of one year, arise over the possession of objects. This broad category does not imply a specific motivation, yet some authors interpret nearly every conflict in which objects are involved as possession-motivated (Brenner and Mueller 1982a; Caplan et al. 1991; Eckerman, Whatley and McGehee 1979; Hay and Ross 1982; Shantz 1987). Others call it “object conflict” in order to avoid the motivation question (Eckerman and Peterman 2004; Shantz 1987). Some differentiate between types of possession, e.g., territorial possession, object possession, or possession of social objects, i.e., jealousy (Viernickel 2000). Very few authors 4

suggest other reasons for conflicts, such as defense of the self or hierarchy (Bronson 1975; Frankel and Arbel 1980; Hay and Ross 1982; La Freniere and Charlesworth 1983), and we are not aware of any study that sets out criteria for identifying the motives of the conflict or tries to connect different motives to different behaviors, attitudes, outcomes, or the success or failure of adult intervention. We posit three main reasons for this deficiency. First, focusing on the social dimension of the first two years of life is rather new in developmental psychology. Much research has been done on so-called “positive social behavior,” such as coordinated action, play, and pro-social behavior, as well as on the positive and negative aspects of the social life of preschool children and on the early development of the parent-infant relationship, yet conflicts between peers in the first two years of life are not yet well studied. Second, studying children’s inner processes at the preverbal stage is objectively difficult. Children’s motivations are usually examined using questionnaires or projective tests, both of which assume that participating children are capable of expressing themselves verbally. Because experiments and observational analyses at the preverbal stage are open to interpretation and are not easy to validate, they are less favored by researchers. Thus research on conflict behavior in the first two years of life has focused on objective and easily measurable dimensions such as frequency, duration, and whether objects are involved. Using these measures, researchers have so far failed to find much developmental change in conflict behavior during the first two years of life (for a review see Hay 1984). Third, the deductive approach to study design is the preferred research strategy in contemporary psychology. Although the scientific advantages of the deductive method are not in doubt, sometimes it is necessary to adopt, to the extent possible, an unprejudiced view of the research question and employ an inductive, bottom-up approach. In basic research, this is the case when existing knowledge is insufficient and any hypothesis might direct the researcher’s attention in a very narrow direction and exclude consideration of other 5

possibilities; or when deductive methods have failed to explain certain phenomena. In our view, all of these issues apply to conflict behavior in the first two years of life. In exploring the reasons for conflicts in the first two years of life, one should consider the emergence of motivation in and of itself in children of this age. No motivation requiring a matured self-awareness can normally be attributed to children younger than 18 months since self-awareness is not usually fully developed until this age (for a review see Rochat 2001; and Schaffer 1996). Motivations such as possession or hierarchy are self-related and thus presuppose this stage of development. Here one should distinguish between conflicts over use of an object, which are possible and common under the age of 18 months, and over the ownership of an object, i.e., the socially acknowledged right to hold, use, keep, and make decisions about an object — to understand it as related to oneself. Some authors apply a very broad definition to possession conflicts – as conflicts over use of an object, this allows any activity, thought, or feeling concerning an object to be understood as “possession.” However, in the search for more precise motivations, a narrower definition, such as the second one, suggested by Bakeman and Brownlee (1982), is rather helpful. The capacity for self-objectification is a prerequisite for this kind of object-related conflict (Bischof-Koehler 1998; Furby 1980). Although there is some evidence for the development of understanding of ownership from 18 to 24 months (Hay 2006; Rodgon and Rashman 1976 cite in Hay & Ross, 1982), no such evidence exists for the first year of life (Furby 1980). Other motivations such as hunger, thirst, and the urge to explore do not require a sense of selfawareness; indeed, these basic motivations are observable in animals (Berlyne 1960; Pavlov 1927). Curiosity, or the drive to explore, is of particular importance when investigating infants’ and toddlers’ behavior toward toys and toward other children, especially because the urge to explore objects, primarily with the hands, peaks during the second year of life (Keller and Boigs 1989).

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Research Goal and Research Questions On the basis of the existing body of knowledge about the development of identity, cognitive and motoric achievements, and the motivation system in the first two years of life, we strongly doubt that the need for possession (narrow defined) explains all motivation in young toddlers and infants. We also doubt the existence of a single motivation for asserting one’s own will or fighting for a goal. The main objective of our explorative study is therefore to identify the motivations underlying conflicts among peers between 8 and 22 months and to characterize them and the course of their development. We believe that clarifying these issues could enhance our understanding of social development in the first two years of life and contribute to the development of applied pedagogical interventions. Hypotheses: Since our approach is mainly exploratory, we have deduced the following broadly formulated hypotheses based on the conclusions discussed above: 1. The “possession” and “hierarchy” motivations do not appear in conflicts until at least the age of 18 months. 2. In the first 18 months of life, motivations for conflict stem mainly from basic needs and not from more sophisticated needs, which require higher cognitive and emotional capabilities. 3. There is a noticeable evolution in both the variety and quality of motivations for conflict between the end of the first year of life and the end of the second year.

Methods Sample Our sample includes 28 children, 16 girls (57%) and 12 boys (43%), all from the Zurich area. Most of the children came from middle-class families (76% of the parents had at least one 7

degree from a four-year college). About half of the children (46%) had siblings, the other half (54%) did not. In most of the families (89%) both parents had full- or part-time jobs. Eleven percent of the children lived with a (working) single mother. The sample was recruited by contacting daycare centers in the Zurich area over a six-month period. During this time frame, every 8-month-old infant whose parents gave consent was included in the sample as a “target child.” The parents of all other children in the daycare centers were also informed about our study. Only children whose parents gave their consent were filmed (“contact children”). The over-representation of highly educated parents is probably due to the fact that although Swiss mothers tend to stay at home during their children’s first years, this practice is less common among highly educated mothers. In addition, daycare centers are often too expensive for lower-income (and generally less well-educated) working mothers.

Procedures The method we used was inductive naturalistic observation in a longitudinal setting. Each child was observed and filmed three times, each time for 30 minutes during free play in his or her own daycare center. Free play, in which teachers, although present, do not direct the children’s play, is a daily activity in all daycare centers in the Zurich area. The group composition in each center was mostly stable, so it was possible to film each target child in all three observation sessions with almost exactly the same group of contact children. The person filming the group visited the daycare center prior to the first filming appointment, introduced herself to the children, and made sure they became acquainted with the camera. The video camera was equipped with a strong zoom, enabling the researcher to maintain a certain distance from the children and avoid interfering with their interactions. All the children were aware of her presence, but according to the teachers’ report only in one case was a child’s

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behavior severely affected by the presence of the observer. This observation was excluded from the analysis. All target children were 8 months old at the time of the first observation (T1), 14 months old at the second (T2), and 22 months old at the third (T3). These three ages were chosen taking into account some important developmental milestones around the second year of life. At the age of 8 months, interaction among infants is evident, and they are just achieving a sense of object permanence and starting to become mobile. At the age of 14 months, locomotion has developed and children are mobile enough to get themselves actively into and out of a variety of situations; also, their ability to grasp the intentions of others have matured (Bretherton, McNew and Beeghly-Smith 1981; Meltzoff 1995; Tomasello 1995), as well as the capacity for referred imitation (Meltzoff 1995). At the age of 22 months, children begin to be selfaware (Bischof-Kohler 1994; see review by Rochat 2001; and by Schaffer 1996), which opens a whole new range of possibilities to them, such as verbal expression (Bates, Camaioni and Volterra 1975; Bruner 1983). At the age of 16 months, their general development was evaluated using the German version of the Griffiths developmental scale (Griffiths 1954, 1983); all of the children were within the range of normal development.

Coding and Analyzing the Conflicts The coding computer program Observer by Noldus was used to code the video material. The coding manual, which was adapted from Viernickel (2000) and Brenner and Mueller (1982b), focused on shared meaning. However, we adopted Shantz’s (1987) more demanding definition of conflict, which emphasizes mutual opposition: “Occasions when child A does or says something that influences child B, child B resists, and child A persists” (284), and requires at least three actions. Thus by Shantz’s definition, a conflict begins with an initial, not yet conflictual, interaction (Child A does something, to which child B will later resist), 9

and ends when a shared meaning arises that is obviously different from the conflict, regardless of whether the new shared meaning is related to the conflict (e.g., crying), or includes the conflict partner (e.g., playing together).

We identified 98 incidences of conflict: 14 at T1, 26 at T2, and 58 at T3. Ten children (36%) were involved in conflicts at T1; 10 (36%) at T2; and 17 (61%) at T3. After the conflicts were identified, we coded the behavior units of both of the target child and his or her partners in the conflict. These behavior units included any expressive and communicative behavior shown during the conflict, such as smiling, vocalizing, crying, rejecting, offering an object, etc., as well as noncommunicative behaviors related to objects or other persons, such as gazing, manipulating an object, etc. The average percentage of interrater agreement among three coders was 72% (range: 0%–98% per observation date).

Analyzing the Target Children’s Motivation During Conflicts We analyzed the coded scenes of conflict using qualitative methods. Since our categorical analysis was explorative, no reliability test was conducted. We employed a reconstructive procedure (compare Dittrich et al. 2001; Wegner-Spoehring 1995) and considered the behavior of both the target children and their conflict partners, the conflict outcome, and the behavior and influence of the caregiver if one was present. The reasons for the target children’s behavior during the conflicts were always interpreted on the basis of the lowest developmental-psychological common denominator. For example, if a child cried and showed no clear signs of hurt feelings but clear signs of physical pain, then we associated the reaction with physical pain and not with possible but unseen hurt feelings or other possible variables. Sometimes we could not exclude hurt feelings (or a long list of other possibilities), but we certainly could not ignore obvious signs of other variables, such as

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physical pain. Therefore, we only considered interpretations for which at least some signs were evident. In looking for these signs, we considered the target child’s behavior; facial, vocal, and verbal expressions (as indicators of the child’s emotional status and as clues to what was bothering him or her); the event that happened prior to the conflict; the conflict outcome and the target child’s reaction to it (indifference, happiness, frustration, sadness, anger, etc.); as well as the behavior of the conflict partner. We also considered the existing developmental psychological body of knowledge—which identifies possible interpretations and excludes improbable interpretations (e.g., jealousy at the age of 8 months is rather improbable)—and any additional information available about the target children.

Results The motivational themes we identified at each observation point are presented below along with the reasons behind our interpretations.

8 months (T1) At T1, when the children were 8 months old, we identified two major motivations for resistance: “interrupted activity” in 50% of the conflicts and “exploration” in 43% (the remaining 7%, which represents the motivation for a single conflict, was coded as unclear). These two conflict motivations correspond to Eckerman and Peterman’s descriptions (2004) of early negotiating, a common source of conflict among infants. Interrupted activity: In this situation, the target child was occupied with an object. Another child interrupted by taking the object of activity, preventing the target child from continuing or concluding his or her activity. The target child offered resistance that was focused on achieving the goal of maintaining or finishing the interrupted activity.

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In the literature such a situation would be often interpreted as possession conflict since in most conflicts the target child’s activity was related to an object. We would like to explain our primary rationale for interpreting this situation differently: I.

First and foremost, as mentioned above, there is not enough evidence to suggest the existence of an understanding of possession at the age of 8 months. Quite the contrary; this probably requires self-awareness, which appears only at about 18 months of age.

II.

Second, the children involved in such conflicts showed neither anger toward the conflict partner nor expressions of insult, but explicitly the desire to have the object again in order to continue their activity. Once the object was regained, they continued playing. In single cases, the target child was exhausted from crying and wanted to be comforted instead of playing, or the child lost interest and left the object completely untouched, turned to another one, and in this way ended the conflict. However, in no case did the target child want to keep the object without continuing the interrupted play. If the target child lost interest in playing with the object and began to play with something else, no conflict arose over the possession of the object. The most obvious interpretation requiring the least conjecture is that continuous play was the goal in the conflict.

We call the second motivation for offering resistance exploration: The target child initially watched another child manipulating an object. Then the target child focused on taking the object from this child. The other child refused to let the object go, and the target child offered resistance or fought for the goal until he or she got the object or until the conflict ended in another way. What is the target child’s goal in this case? These kinds of conflicts are commonly interpreted as possession or jealousy conflicts. The most basic validation of this interpretation is that 12

children refuse to accept the substitution of an identical object lying on the floor or offered to them by the caregiver, but demand the specific object being played with by their peer. Another is that often a child’s interest in an object is only awakened when another child starts playing with it (e.g., Eckerman et al. 1979). We would like to suggest an alternative interpretation: The target child sees the object another child holds as attractive and tries to obtain it. The primary reason for this desire is the natural urge to explore, not social interest in the peer. The urge to explore, or the stimulation motive, has been identified as one of two inherent motivations (Berlyne 1960; Piaget 1954), one of two complementary basic motives—the stimulation motive. (The complementary motivation system is the Security motive. See Bischof 1985; Bowlby 1980). Children are equipped with survival mechanisms, one of which is their natural curiosity. Children try out, exercise, and practice using whatever tools they find in their surroundings to explore their environment and to study the tools themselves, thus increasing both their capabilities and their survival chances. This curiosity and the urge to explore—not jealousy or the drive for possession— motivated the target child to grab an interesting tool and to explore and study it.1 Our main reasons for rejecting the common interpretations and suggesting an alternate “exploration” motive are as follows: I.

The cognitive prerequisites for jealousy have not yet been achieved by the age of 8 months. The target child has to know what he or she owns and what the other child owns. The target child then has to compare what he or she owns to what another child has. If this comparison shows that the target child is disadvantaged, then the target child will become jealous. But jealousy requires self-awareness, which usually develops at about 18 months, and the ability to compare and draw conclusions develops even later. Even if we were to assume that children have an

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Sometimes the contact child tried to initiate social contact with the target child by imitating him or her. These situations did not develop into conflicts as defined above. In “explorations” children focused on the object of interest, both visually and manually.

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intuitive desire to have everything that others possess, we could sidestep the requirement for comparison abilities but we could not ignore the self-awareness prerequisite. II.

We assume that the other child’s manipulation of the object adds to its attractiveness. It is well known that movement and function increase the attractiveness of an object, so it is unsurprising that children wish to explore objects that are being played with rather than objects lying still and silent on the floor. Adults know what potential functions and possibilities for manipulation an object has even when it is not in use. Yet for an 8-month-old infant, a noisy and/or moving object is not identical to a still object.

14 months (T2) At T2, when the children were 14 months old, we identified several motivational themes of conflict among the target children. Four of these are discussed below. The two themes identified in the conflicts among the 8-month-old infants recurred when the target children were 14 months old, namely interrupted activity (35% of the conflicts at T2) and exploration (31%). These were the most common reasons for a 14-month-old child to offer resistance or fight for his or her goal. At this age we also saw a mixed form, in which more than one motive seemed to play a role in the conflict (8%). We also noted some other issues, each one of which appeared only once (altogether 19%); we do not address them individually here since we assume that they are very situation-specific (such as removing a disturbing object or imitating adults’ behavior), and thus their interpretation probably cannot be generalized, though the fact that several situation-specific single issues even show up at this age is worthy of mention. Here we discuss two further issues that, though they rarely appeared, are likely to hold more than a situation-specific meaning. We call them “awoken needs” (4%) and “the will to effect” (4%). 14

Awoken needs: The target child sees another child satisfying a physical need, e.g., drinking from a bottle. The target child stops his current activity and gazes at the drinking mouth or the bottle. Then, focusing on the object (the bottle), the target child grabs for it. We think that seeing another child satisfying a physical need (drinking) reminds the target child of his or her own need (thirst), and the child grabs for the object (the bottle) to assuage that need. This situation, like those described above, could be interpreted as jealousy or possession conflict. Again, we do not share this line of interpretation, for the following reasons: I.

As in the case of 8-month-olds, the cognitive prerequisites have in most cases not yet been fulfilled at the age of 14 months.

II.

We saw no signs of jealousy or possession conflict in the filmed material, but simply a child grabbing for an object another child was using to satisfy his needs. When the target child was satisfied, he simply abandoned the object and turned to another activity. Thus the goal is clearly shown, as is the strategy to achieve it. This mechanism is familiar to adults—it is easy to forget your needs while absorbed in an activity, but the smell of food or the sight of someone drinking suddenly reminds you of your own suppressed needs. When this happens to a child of 14 months, he or she will try to satisfy his or her needs in the easiest and most expeditious manner without considering possession, probably because such consideration is not yet within the child’s capacity, or is secondary to the primary motive that has been activated.

Therefore, we do not see a need to interpret this motivation speculatively beyond what is clearly shown.

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The fourth motivational theme we identified among the 14-month-olds was demonstrated by only one target child. We call it “the will to effect.” In this conflict, the target child’s actions were rather inconsistent. He grabbed an object from another child and then gave it back, or he threw it away and took another, or he disturbed the conflict partner in various ways. The target child repeatedly maintained eye contact with the other child, yet he did not focus solely on either the conflict partner or the object. With this kind of conflict, it was difficult to identify a specific goal besides an obvious element of provocation. We assumed the development of self-awareness was underlying this behavior. Typical of this developmental phase is the child’s need to explore his or her ability to create effects and to test the power of his or her own will on the situation. This kind of behavior is sometimes manifested as early as 14 months. Based on additional information we had about the development of the target children, we cannot exclude this interpretation in this particular case; nevertheless, other interpretations are also possible. The target child’s behavior might be the expression of a disputatious temperament or a specific instance of model learning. Yet we can exclude possession and jealousy since the target child had no interest in keeping or using the objects the conflict partners had, nor did he cause the conflict partners to lose the objects. These conflicts ended naturally when the target child turned to other activities (cleaning, caregiver involvement, talking, tidying up, watching, etc.).

22 months (T3) At T3, when the target children were 22 months old, we identified the four previously mentioned conflict motivations—interrupted activity (40%), exploration (17%), awoken needs (2%), and will to effect (2%)—plus three additional reasons for a child to offer resistance and get involved in a conflict. These we call “possession” (24%), “dominance”

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(2%), and “contact and sensation seeking” (5%). The remaining conflicts were classified as either “conflict with mixed motives” (3%) or “unclear” (5%).

Possession: In these conflicts, the target child demonstrated a need to control an object. The target child either defended his or her objects from another child, or wanted to take an object from another child. During the conflict the target child’s verbal and nonverbal expressions referred to the child’s own self (e.g., “mine!” rather than “no!”; hugging the object; pointing at it and then at him or herself), and the typical accompanying emotions were often visibly intense. At the end of the conflict, the child was sometimes satisfied just by holding the object and not playing with it. This never happened during conflicts at an earlier age. All of these clearly indicate the importance of the bond between the object and the child. The expression of intense emotions is not unique to possession conflict, of course, but does indicate an involvement of feelings that is characteristic of self-awareness. The conflicts that occur before the development of self-awareness are usually factual, and in the rare instance when emotions are displayed it is by crying. The cause of the crying is physical pain or frustration when the child’s goals cannot be achieved. The role of anger, insult, or other emotions cannot be determined since crying dominates the facial expression. However, one need not assume the existence of these emotions in order to explain the conflict. By contrast, in conflicts interpreted as possession conflicts, the emotions are often more intense, and the accompanying facial expressions usually represent a broader and indisputable palette of emotions (e.g., anger and insult).

The four characteristics of possession conflicts (use of the word “mine”; gestures indicating a bond between the child and the object; the expression of intense emotional involvement; satisfaction by simply holding the object) led us to conclude that control of the object is the 17

target child’s main goal. This in turn seems to indicate an understanding of possession (Furby 1978); or as Bronson (1975) suggests, it might have something to do with identity: the child tries to defend his or her broader self by defending his or her objects. The category of “possession” in our study is therefore more narrowly defined than the more common categories of conflict motivation. Another motivation we identified that prompted a child to offer resistance at the age of 22 months was dominance. In these conflicts, the target child argued about rather than struggled over an object: the child was willing to give it back or leave it with the conflict partner—as long as the conflict partner would do with it what the target child demanded. The target child’s tone of voice and gesticulation gave a ‘bossy’ impression. The target child did not protest or whine imploringly, but instead firmly commanded the other child. The target child did not refer the object to him or herself (e.g., by saying “mine” or hugging it), but focused on allowing or forbidding the other child a certain use. Keeping the object was not the issue, nor was playing with it or using it; instead, what mattered to the target child was making decisions about the object. The target child did not necessarily need to use the object him or herself but did want to determine how it was used. We assume that rather than possession motivation this behavior is part of dominance motivation, which has been described by many authors, including Frankel and Arbel (1980), La Freniere and Charlesworth (1983), and Hay and Ross (1984), among others. The goal of dominance conflicts is to acquire or maintain for oneself higher standing in the social hierarchy.

Only one target child demonstrated the motivation we call “contact and sensation seeking,” yet this child showed the very same pattern in several conflicts.

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This child, who usually spent 11 hours a day in the daycare center, would run around the room with no apparent aim, grab an object from the hands of another child without comment, play with it for a very short time, and then abandon it or throw it away. He would also try to join others in the middle of their play, disregarding the rules of their play, which usually instigated a conflict and caused the target child to be rejected. Sometimes he would try to gain the attention of another child and join him in a common activity, but again without considering the state, needs, or interests of the other child. We interpreted this very active behavior and high frequency of conflict as an unsuccessful strategy to establish social contact and to escape the boredom and loneliness of a very long and impersonal daily routine. It could also be an expression of a sensation-seeking temperament, or a result of short and irregular sleep patterns, which are typical of children who spend long hours in daycare, and which impair concentration and regulation of emotions (Bates, Viken, Alexander, Beyers and Stockton 2002; Sadeh, Gruber and Raviv 2002).

Discussion In summary, we identified seven categories of motivation that give rise to conflicts among children between the ages of 8 and 22 months. Thus we suggest that ascribing conflicts among children in this age group solely to a motive such as possession is a reductive and misleading interpretation of children’s capacities and their social life. We believe that the role that the urge to explore plays in conflicts between peers in the first two years of life has been underestimated. Furthermore, it is worth noting that “possession” can have a negative connotation, which might influence both the caregiver’s attitude toward a toddler involved in a conflict and the pedagogical intervention. The other motivations we identified generally do not have negative connotations.

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We also identified a course of development for conflict motivation, something which has been entirely neglected in the literature. The motivations identified in this study increase in variety as children get older. In children aged 8 months (T1), we identified only two issues. In 14month-olds (T2), we found diverse motivations as well as a mixed form. In children at the age of 22 months (T3), we identified seven different motivations. The first two issues to appear, T1’s “interrupted activity” and “exploration,” are the only ones to appear in all three ages studied, and they are the major conflict motivations for children across the entire age segment. Only at the age of 22 months, after the emergence of self-awareness, are the issues most commonly suggested in the literature, possession and hierarchy, clearly identifiable. In fact, curiosity and the need to explore seem to be a leading motivation driving children into conflicts in their second year of life. In addition to the motivation we call “exploration,” “interrupted activity” and “contact and sensation seeking” can be considered aspects of curiosity and exploratory behavior in the broader sense. The need to complete an interrupted activity, which in itself offers sufficient motivation for a child to engage in conflict, is presumably connected to the strong need for exploration, since exploration of objects figures highly in most of these interrupted activities. “Contact and sensation seeking” can naturally be understood as Berlyne’s “diversive exploration” (1960), i.e., a nonspecific exploration resulting from boredom. Viewed in this light, exploration deserves far greater attention in both the study of conflicts among very young children and pedagogical interventions in the early years.

Since our study was explorative, additional research—involving a larger sample, different forms of caregiving, and experiments—is necessary to verify or to modify the interpretations we have suggested. We hope that our interpretations will inspire further research in the field, enhance understanding of conflicts among the very young, and contribute to the development of appropriate pedagogical methods for this age segment. 20

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Acknowledgement This study was supported by a Marie Heim Voegtlin Fund grant (PMCD1–106111) awarded to the first author by the Swiss National Foundation.

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