When asking if conflict
is healthy or unhealthy, one must realize that conflict, according to
theorists such as Piaget, Erikson, and Vygotsky, believed that conflict
helps the child to develop many important life skills. Because conflict
may be healthy, a guidance approach, rather than traditional discipline,
may be more appropriate when dealing with children’s conflicts. This
study examined the possible causes and resolutions of conflict, gender
and age differences in conflict, and how instances of conflict association
with preschool children’s social competence. Finding suggest that conflict
is positively associated with teach rated social competence, showing
that conflict may serve a healthy developmental function.
Conflict is a common
occurrence for children. Many have asked “Is conflict healthy or unhealthy?”
When looking at discipline, should conflict be seen as misbehavior or
a learning experience? Piaget believed that conflict in children was
healthy, and if worked through, would help children to overcome their
egocentric thought patterns (Arsenio & Cooperman, 1996). Erikson
believed that life was full of conflict and in order to become a better
person, one must resolve the conflict in each stage of life (Trawick-Smith,
2003). Vygotsky saw conflict as a learning experience. He believed that
children, if in their zone of proximal development, would learn from
the conflict and adult models to function better in social contexts.
Looking at the beliefs of all of these well known theorists, one gets
the feeling that conflict is a positive, healthy part of a child’s life.
However, many people still view conflict as a negative thing.
Dan Gartrell, author
of A Guidance Approach to Discipline, is one of the leading authors
on guidance, as opposed to traditional discipline. He believes that
traditional discipline “criticizes children—often-publicly—for unacceptable
behaviors, whereas guidance teaches children positive alternatives”
(Gartrell, 1995, p. 27). In the past, children who have caused conflict
have been seen as “troublemakers” or as “naughty.” Gartrell believes
that the roots of seeing misbehavior, or conflictive behaviors, as evil
or naughty goes back to the Middle Ages when children were viewed as
naturally “tending toward evil”(Gartrell, 1995, p. 28). However, when
taking Piaget, Erikson, and Vygotsky into consideration, conflict, or
misbehavior, is simply part of being human.
Without conflict, children
would not learn important life skills such as judging emotional interactions
with others, learning personal boundaries, facing future problems, and
learning important conflict resolution skills. Many different child
care facilities have recently turned to the guidance approach to discipline.
They have taken an active role in teaching their students appropriate
behavior taking on Locke’s philosophy that children come into the world
as a blank slate and must be guided to behave in a certain way. Conflict
is seen as normative behavior. However, they believe, in respect to
conflict, that “it is the responsibility of adults to make available
to children, during their effort to resolve children’s conflicts, culturally
valued skills that children can use later without the adult’s assistance”
(Goncu & Cannella, 1996, p. 60). In other words, teachers must give
children conflict resolution skills so that they can effectively resolve
their own conflicts later in life. Through learning these skills, children
will learn autonomy or independent functioning (Goncu & Cannella,
1996). Instead of viewing conflict as negative, one must begin to see
it as a part of human nature.
In order to understand
the current study, one must first define conflict. Killen and Nucci
define conflict as two children independently pursuing personal goals
that happen to bring them into conflict (Arsenio & Cooperman, 1996).
Goncu and Cannella (1996) define conflict as disagreements or oppositional
interaction between individual children or groups of children. This
study is guided by the latter definition. We furthered this definition
and conceptualized conflict as disagreements or oppositional interaction
between individual children or between children and teachers. We also
operate under the assumption that misbehavior and conflictive behaviors
are, many times, synonymous. The goal of this study was to examine the
associations between children’s social competence and levels of conflict
and to examine possible differences in peer-peer and teacher-peer conflict.
Specifically, there are four hypotheses tested in this study.
Hypothesis 1: Males
and females will have different types and causes of conflict, as well
as different conflict resolutions.
This hypothesis comes
from the assumption that there are gender differences based on socialization
in conflict and resolution.
Younger children will have more conflict than older children.
This hypothesis comes
from the assumption that as children grow older, they are usually more
socially competent and, based on the previous hypothesis, the more social
competence they have, the less conflict, or misbehavior, they will experience.
Children rated by teachers as having high levels of aggression will
have more conflict.
This hypothesis comes
from the assumption that aggressive children will have more conflict
than non-aggressive children. It also shows the assumption that aggression
and conflict (or misbehavior) are strongly associated.
Children rated as having high social competence will have lower levels
This hypothesis comes
from the assumption that conflict misbehaving is associated with lower
social competence and social understanding.
(16 boys; ages 2-6, M = 46 mo) from an on-campus preschool at a southwestern
university participated in this study. The preschool is an NAEYC accredited
program and uses the High Scope Curriculum, which is guidance based.
The majority of children in the study were Caucasian.
The children were videotaped
during their normal routines at preschool for five-minute intervals
(M = 7.5). Each observed interval was coded for several dimensions:
presence of conflict, cause of conflict (target child
provokes/nothing happens, target child provokes/conflict, peer provokes/nothing
happens, peer provokes/conflict, teacher provokes/ nothing happens,
and teacher provokes/conflict), type of conflict (peer-peer,
peer-teacher), topic of conflict (words, object, disobeying teacher,
space, actions), and how the conflict was resolved (child forgets/no
resolution, no intervention/no resolution, child intervention/no resolution,
teacher intervention/no resolution, teacher resolves by demanding, teacher
resolves by changing subject, teacher resolves by confronting issue/talking
about conflict, and child-peer resolution). These coding categories
were derived from observing four hours of videotaped interactions between
children, their peers, and their teachers. The categories were designed
to represent conflict in its entirety, to the best of our ability (i.e.,
from cause to resolution).
for each child the Dodge Checklist of Social Relationships (Coie &
Dodge, 1988), which provides an index of children’s aggression and overall
social competence. Teachers were asked to rate how true each statement
was for each child on a scale from 1 (never true of this child) to 5
(almost always true of this child). Sample items include “this child
is accepted by the peer group” and “this child disrupts the peer group
by inappropriate or attention getting behavior.”
Amount of conflict
varied across participants. Two children had no instances of conflict
and one had 15 instances. In regard to Hypothesis 1, some differences
were found between boys and girls in terms of type of conflict. Descriptively,
the leading topic of conflict for girls was peer words and for boys,
disobeying the teacher. An example of a peer words conflict is when
a boy told another boy he was playing with Barbie Dolls. The child who
was accused protested by saying “No I’m not!” This conflict began because
of a peer’s words. An example of disobeying the teacher is when a child
refused to clean up toys after the teacher requested that he pick them
up. Girls had the most conflict over peer words, while boys had the
most conflict over disobeying the teacher. There was not a significant
difference, however, in the rate of conflict for boys and girls. The
majority of conflicts were resolved by the teacher confronting the issue
and discussing it with the children. The leading resolution by girls
was child-peer resolution, whereas boys most often resolved conflict
via teacher intervention. As with our findings for rate of conflict,
there was not a significant difference between type of resolution between
boys and girls (see Figures 1 and 2).
Figure 1. Causes
of conflict for boys and girls (C = child; T = teacher; P = peer)
Figure 2. Conflict
resolution for boys and girls (C = child; T = teacher; P = peer)
Associations were found
between children’s conflict and their aggression and levels of social
competence. Unexpectedly, no associations were found between child age
and amount of conflict (see Table 1). Mixed results were found for Hypothesis
3. Bivariate correlations showed that more incidents of conflict are
associated with lower teacher rated aggression (r = -.53, p
< .01). Similarly, total peer conflict was associated with lower
teacher rated aggression (r = -.48, p < .01). However,
teacher-peer conflict was associated with higher teacher rated aggression
(r = .58, p <.01). Results also were contrary to Hypothesis
4. Total peer conflict was associated with higher teacher rated overall
peer competence (r = .49, p <.01).
age, teacher-rated social competence and aggression, and proportion
* = p = .05;**
= p = .01
Findings from the current
study suggest that preschool children’s conflict is associated with
children’s social competence and peer conflict may serve a beneficial
role in children’s aggression and social development. Children’s peer
conflict was positively associated with their social competence. Children
may have more interaction with peers because of their social competence
and therefore, may experience more opportunities for conflict. These
findings seem to support the beliefs of well-known theorists. For instance,
according to Piaget, conflict helps children overcome their egocentrism
(Arsenio & Cooperman, 1996). Therefore, one might gather that the
more conflict a child experiences, the better they are at taking on
another’s point of view.
Vygotsky’s views on
conflict also were supported with this research. Because the program
implemented with the children was guidance based, they experience teacher
modeling on how to resolve conflict a majority of the time. Our findings
also suggested that the conflict is mainly resolved by teacher intervention.
Therefore, these findings support Vygotsky’s view that conflict provides
for a learning experience for children when they have correct modeling
or “scaffolding” from adults (Trawick-Smith, 2003, p. 54).
The guidance approach
used in this setting also may have helped the teachers to view their
students who had the most conflict in a more positive way. The students
who had the most peer conflict were seen as having high social competence
and lower levels of aggression, instead of as being “troublemakers”
or “naughty.” This research supported Gartrell’s view of guidance as
beneficial (Gartrell, 1995). Children seemed to be learning important
conflict resolution skills, which could be the cause of their ratings
as high in social competence and low in aggression. The children who
experienced more peer conflict seemed to have learned how to interact
with peers in a more positive way. Using the teacher as a mediator in
child conflict seems to have beneficial outcomes. For instance, teachers
model appropriate conflict resolution strategies, as well as teach children
emotional understanding when it comes to other point of views.
A surprising finding
was that age had no significant effect on how much conflict children
experienced. This could be due to the small sample of younger children
participating in this study. The gender differences in conflict also
were interesting. Although they were not significant, boys seemed to
have more conflicts over actions and girls seemed to have more conflict
over words. These findings reinforce the gender roles that children
enact. Boys tend to be more able to be aggressive in a playful way and
are more involved with “doing” than with “saying.” Girls, on the other
hand, tend to be more involved in the relationship with the other person
and “saying” is an important part of that interaction with others. It
also was interesting to find that boys tended to disobey the teacher
more often than girls. Again, this reinforces gender roles of quieter,
more elaborate, emotionally expressive, and timid girls, and independent,
less compliant, and more demanding boys (Trawick-Smith, 2003, p. 313).
Because the sample
was so small, future studies should incorporate more children from a
broader range of facilities with varying programs. Institutions that
implement guidance programs and institutions that implement more traditional
discipline programs should be compared. Children seem to have higher
social competence due to conflict in this guidance-based program. Based
on these findings, guidance programs may be more beneficial for children’s
social development than traditional discipline programs. Overall, these
findings suggest that conflict may actually serve a positive developmental
function in the development of children’s social competence.
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Cooperman, S. (1996). Children’s conflict-related emotions: Implications
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Coie, J.D., & Dodge,
K.A. (1988). Multiple sources of data on social behavior and social
status in the school: A cross-age comparison. Child Development,
Gartrell, D. (July,
1995) Misbehavior or mistaken behavior? Young Children, 27-34.
Goncu, A. & Cannella,
V. (1996). The role of teacher assistance in children’s construction
of intersubjectivity during conflict resolution. New Directions for
Child Development, 73, 57-69.
Trawick-Smith, J. (2003)
Early Childhood Development: A Multicultural Perspective. 3rd
Ed. New Jersey: Merrill Prentice Hall.