WHEN DO CHILDREN DEVELOP SKILLS IN CONFLICT RESOLUTION?

Part of “growing up” is our development of conflict resolution skills and researchers have been studying how they are learned over time.

A comprehensive review of 31 research reports on child (ages 2–10), adolescent (ages 11–18), and young adult (ages 19–25) studied strategies for ending disagreements with peers. For the most part, the researchers worked with middle-class North Americans of European ancestry. Peers were defined as siblings, friends, romantic partners, or acquaintances, including dormitory roommates and classmates.

Children end disagreements with coercion more often than with negotiation or disengagement. They are also more likely to end with negotiation than with disengagement.

Adolescents tend to end disagreements with negotiation rather than with either coercion or disengagement, with no difference with the use of either.

Young adults end disagreements with negotiation more often than with coercion or disengagement and with disengagement more often than with coercion. As experience may tell us as age increases from childhood to young adulthood, the use of negotiation increases. Coercion does not fall below disengagement until young adulthood.

When the peer relationship is considered separately, negotiation is prevalent in all peer relationships, except those with siblings. Friends, romantic partners and acquaintances resolve conflicts more often with negotiation than with coercion or disengagement. And more so with coercion than with disengagement. The studies go on to show how young adults end disagreements with siblings by typically using negotiation instead of coercion or disengagement. But compared to adolescents, who end arguments with siblings using disengagement over negotiation, they prefer coercion to end conflict instead of disengagement.

At what age, then, can children learn negotiation as a conflict resolution skill? Recently a new childrens book came to my attention called, “The Elephant that Blows Rainbows,” and it’s a fairy tale about mediation. The author, Dimitra Mousiolo, believes that even as children we can learn the tools to find solutions to most problems.