Conflict Narratives in Middle Childhood

The Social, Emotional, and Moral Significance of Story-Sharing

Marsha D. Walton, Alice J. Davidson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351866002
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Conflict Narratives in Middle Childhood presents evidence from twenty years of research, examining nearly 3,000 narratives from 1,600 children in eight settings in two countries about their own experiences with interpersonal conflict. Close readings, combined with systematic analysis of dozens of features of the stories reveal that when children are invited to write or talk about their own conflicts, they produce accounts that are often charming and sometimes heartbreaking, and that always bring to light their social, emotional, and moral development. Children's personal stories about conflict reveal how they create and maintain friendships, how they understand and react to the social aggression that threatens those friendships, and how they understand and cope with physical aggression ranging from the pushing and poking of peers to criminal violence in their neighborhoods or families. Sometimes children describe the efforts of adults to influence their conflicts - efforts they sometimes welcome and sometimes resist. Their stories show them 'taking on' gender and other cultural commitments. We are not just watching children become more and more like us as they move through the elementary school years - we are watching them become the architects of a future we will only see to the extent that we understand their way of making sense.

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PART I

Listening to Children’s Stories About Their Own Conflicts

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1

WHY CONFLICT? WHY NARRATIVE?

A Theoretical Framework for the Study of Peer Conflict Narratives in Middle Childhood

In human beings, with their astonishing narrative gift, one of the principal forms of peacekeeping is the human gift for presenting, dramatizing, and explicating the mitigating circumstances surrounding conflict-threatening breaches in the ordinariness of life.

Jerome Bruner, 1990, p. 95

This book is about the stories children tell about their own conflicts. We are asking questions about both the role of narrative in development and the nature of middle childhood conflicts. In this chapter, we present theory that grounds our thinking about narrative and theory that grounds our thinking about peer conflict. We find critical overlaps in support of our argument that many of the skills involved in managing the conflicts of middle childhood are fundamentally narrative.

Why Narrative

When William James (1890) set about the business of delineating a field of psychology, he noted that there are two quite distinct modes of thought, which he labeled narrative and paradigmatic. Narrative thought can give us a good story, and its highest form is great literature; paradigmatic thought can give us a good argument, and its highest form is philosophy and mathematics. Narrative thinking is motivated by an effort to explain a particular experience, usually in terms of human intentions and reasons, with close attention to a rich context; paradigmatic thinking is motivated by a search for general principles, usually in terms of physical causes, with the vagaries of contextual variations under scientific control. Narrative thought is concerned with life-likeness and meaningfulness; paradigmatic thought is concerned with truthfulness and accuracy. Children make impressive leaps in their paradigmatic thinking skills during middle childhood, especially if they are given experiences with formal education, and developmental scientists have made impressive progress toward describing and explaining these leaps. Maybe it is not surprising that those scientists, having so finely honed their own paradigmatic thinking skills, have devoted much more time and energy and journal pages to understanding the development of logic and reasoning skills than to the development of narrative thought.

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In 1990, with the publication of Acts of Meaning, Jerome Bruner took a backward look at his own first fifty years of critical conversations about and seminal contributions to the study of cognitive development. He noted the serious neglect of narrative thinking, and made a powerful argument that this neglect had tragically isolated the field of psychology from important conversations with scholars in anthropology, philosophy, and literary criticism. This, Bruner argued, has encouraged theory and research in psychology that ignores the fundamental truth that humans are cultural animals. Narrative thinking, according to Bruner, structures and is structured by human culture. A deep understanding of narrative thinking requires us to recognize ourselves as fundamentally cultural, because the same qualities of thought that structure narrative also structure language and most other human cultural practices. Acts of Meaning offered a deep critique of a cognitive science that had given a great deal of attention to how people process information without considering how they use that information to make sense of things – to make their lives meaningful. It also contributed a blueprint for the construction of a developmental science in which meaning-making practices are crucial.

Narrative thinking gives us stories, and story-sharing practices are a critical feature of most human settings that include children. We surround children with stories – didactic stories and fables with morals, fiction designed to entertain, and ordinary accounts about the experiences of daily life. Dozens of studies have now documented both the pervasiveness of stories in children’s lives and the importance of these stories to socialization and education (e.g., Miller & Mehler, 1994). Inspired by Vivian Paley’s (1990; 1997; 2004) beautiful descriptions and interpretations of the narrative quality of children’s play, researchers have considered the role of stories in a variety of classroom endeavors (e.g., Nicolopoulou, 2002). Robyn Fivush and her colleagues working in the Family Narratives Lab at Emory University have listened in on family dinners and other family interactions, seeking to understand the development of autobiographical memory, and incidentally coming to see the transmission of values and gender stereotypes across generations (Bohanek, Fivush, Zaman, Lepore, Merchant, & Duke, 2009). Shirley Brice Heath’s ethnographies in North Carolina and Peggy Miller’s research with colleagues at the University of Illinois have looked at similarities and differences in the narrative worlds of children in cultural communities that differ in socioeconomic and educational opportunities and in ethnicity, finding notably rich narrative skills among children who are likely to be described as disadvantaged (Heath, 1983; Wiley, Rose, Burger, & Miller, 1998). Inspired by a discursive turn in psychology, Michael Bamberg and his colleagues at Clark University have observed the small stories that children share in casual interaction, noting how children banter and chatter about the events of their daily lives to position the self as a certain kind of a person (Bamberg, 2004). Cecilia Wainryb and her colleagues at the University of Utah examined similarities and distinctions in the conflict narratives told by victims and perpetrators, noting that children’s accounts of conflict situations in which they had been the perpetrators were less coherent and less self-focused than in stories about victim experiences, and children’s moral judgments varied by perspective (Wainryb, Brehl, & Matwin, 2005). All of this work and much more that has been done since the publication of Acts of Meaning has made a convincing case that the world of childhood is a storied universe.

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Bruner asserted that it is in telling stories and encouraging children to tell their own stories that we do the primary work of bringing children into culture. This is because the stories we tell our children instantiate what Bruner calls ‘folk psychology.’ This is a set of loosely defined and sometimes contested beliefs about what makes people tick. For example, our cultural communities include students and colleagues who sometimes present their own behavior as sub-standard, and excuse this with such explanations as “I was so tired,” or “I was so stressed out,” or “My roommate broke up with her boyfriend last night.” These will sometimes work fairly well to maintain the respect of peers and professors in the face of poor performance. The excuse “a devil tugged at my spirit all night” would be considerably less effective in our circles, although it might function quite well in some other communities. A folk psychology is a collection of beliefs (about which members of a cultural community will sometimes negotiate) about what kinds of people there are in the world (e.g., children and adults, nobles and commoners, introverts and extroverts), about what might motivate them (greed, anger, altruism) to engage in what kinds of behaviors (playing, studying, taking up arms). Members of a cultural community share a sometimes contested folk psychology that makes sense of their experiences.

Most people would be hard-pressed to articulate the various features of the ‘common sense’ that guides their meaning-making, and there is rarely explicit instruction in folk psychology. Children (and other individuals just joining a cultural community) will ‘pick it up.’ According to Bruner, this uptake is largely accomplished because of a fundamental quality of story-telling that Bruner describes as a dual landscape. At one level, the landscape of action, a story will describe the ‘who, what, where, and when’ of the matter. Events and behaviors will be recounted with attention to their sequence, so that causality may be established or inferred. This kind of reporting creates a stark, ‘just the facts, Ma’am’ story that is recognizably unsatisfying unless it is elaborated upon and enriched by what Bruner called the “landscape of consciousness.”

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A good story, according to Bruner, is peopled by characters who have motives and flaws. It is more likely to focus on reasons than on causes, and a good story-teller will be managing the listener’s inferences about why the protagonists behaved as they did. The landscape of consciousness fills out the action of the story with all the meaning-making work that motivates humans to tell stories in the first place. We want to know what happened, but, more importantly, we want to know why it happened. We want to know who did it, what motivated them to do it, and how they felt about it. We want to know who was responsible, who were the good guys and the bad guys, what were the mitigating circumstances, and what are the lessons to be learned. The landscape of consciousness, described in our stories, is the closest we get to the articulation of our folk psychology.

Stories bring children into culture and teach them our folk psychologies because they function to get us into each other’s heads. We felt the terror of the three little pigs as the big bad wolf promised to huff and puff and blow the house down. Our understanding of jealousy was fundamentally shaped by Snow White’s stepmother. When the little red hen believed that the sky was falling in, but we knew that only an acorn had fallen on her head, we got a glimpse of the power of false belief, and we delighted in the experience of our own knowing. Stories are about what happened, about how those happenings were experienced, and about what those experiences mean. As children listen to stories, and especially as they begin to be called upon to tell their own stories about their own experience, they come to share with other members of their communities a basic understanding about ‘what counts.’ They come to share this, and they also get a chance to contest it. Authoring your own story means you get to make at least the first draft of an account that makes sense of your own experience in light of the common sense of the people around you. This is, in large part, what it means to be a member of a human community. According to Bruner, it is fundamentally what it means to be human.

In the years since Bruner published Acts of Meaning, researchers in cultural psychology have collaborated with educators, clinicians, and social activists to take on the challenge of attending to the stories shared in our cultural communities – stories that celebrate and problematize a wide variety of human plights faced by a wide variety of human characters. These stories, the ones children hear and the ones they create in their families, classrooms, and neighborhoods, prepare them for their own experiences with a host of conflicts.

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Why Conflict

A defining feature of middle childhood development is surely the broadening and deepening of peer relationships, and it is not surprising that peer conflict is a prominent feature of children’s social experience during this time. The establishment and maintenance of new relationships and new kinds of relationships requires new skills, and the practice of those skills is sure to involve awkward missteps.

In 1953, Harry Stack Sullivan wrote convincingly about the developments that change the fairly simple and unstable playmate preferences of early childhood into the ‘chumships’ of the elementary school years. Friendships, during this time of middle childhood, entail a set of obligations and privileges that must be negotiated and renegotiated in the context of painful rejections and betrayals. According to Sullivan, a drive for intimacy with age-mates motivates the important work children do during these years to achieve a more realistic sense of self, a keener ability to take the perspective of others, and to match one’s own needs and resources with those of another person to form satisfying reciprocity. Interpersonal conflicts are puddles or hills on the course that run toward the development of those satisfying relationships. Children discover that their goals are running counter to the goals of a valued playmate. Their desires are opposed, their efforts are thwarted, and conflicts erupt. The preservation of relationships in the face of these conflicts requires an impressive set of newly emerging skills – skills that require deepening understanding of self and other, and skills that require communication and negotiation.

Even before Sullivan’s important work, Piaget’s (1932/65) theory addressed the developmental significance of the emergence of peer relationships in middle childhood, and he gave a good bit of attention to the conflicts that children experience in these relationships. Social interaction with peers provokes conflicts that promote moral development. The spats and tussles that wrinkle family life are typically resolved by an appeal to authority and by the superior power of the parent or older sibling. By contrast, the conflicts that arise between peers set the stage for negotiation among equals. When a parent or teacher lays down the law of the land, there is little impetus to consider the reason for the rule; the child has only to learn what behaviors constitute compliance and violation. The laws of the playground, on the other hand, are imminently disputable, and these disputes invite argument (and reasoning) both about the reason for the rule and about which behaviors constitute violation. With no adjudicating grown-up nearby, children must practice emerging communication and perspective-taking skills. They’ll need to persuade their playmates to take their own view of the situation, and they will be urged to consider interpretations that differ from their own. They will get better at understanding what motivated the behavior of their antagonists, and they will get better at getting their antagonists to understand the reasons for their own behavior. Peer conflicts will play an important role in helping children see connections between intentionality of actors and their culpability for outcomes. The interpersonal conflicts that interrupt the ongoing activities of middle childhood are not unfortunate diversions from a path toward maturity; those conflicts are the bridges and tunnels on the road children must traverse.

As children negotiate conflict episodes, they choose to stand up for themselves and others, to back down when their own and others’ goals collide, to assume a conciliatory or a hostile stance, to avoid or endure the provocations of another child or to instigate conflictual interactions with others. These choices are informed by the child’s assessments of the thoughts and emotions, motives and dispositions of self and other, and by the child’s understanding of the norms and interpretive frames that operate in the immediate cultural context. Children enter the conflict arena of their specific cultural communities and are socialized to handle conflict, drawing on various behavioral and interpretive skills depending on the norms, values, and practices of their school and neighborhood communities.

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Barbara Rogoff (2003) has made convincing arguments for the importance of attending to the particularities of the cultural communities that surround children. As they come to be more full-fledged participants in these communities, children will sometimes adopt and sometimes resist the expectations of their elder...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Conflict Narratives in Middle Childhood
• Title
• Copyright
• Praise
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “What I’ve been in is a lot of conflicts” – Story-Sharing and Making Sense of Conflict in Middle Childhood
• PART I Listening to Children’s Stories About Their Own Conflicts
• PART II How Children Describe Their Own Conflicts
• PART III Applying the Lessons Learned From Children’s Stories of Conflict
• Appendices
• Index