Child Development Milestones for 6 to 12-Year-Old Children- Understanding Skill Abilities in Constructive Conflict Resolution

 A foosball table. It sounded like such a fun gift for my kids—especially my 8, 10 and 11-year-old boys. I could imagine all the fun they would have playing together until did actually play together during winter break. Rather than laughing and having fun, I heard weeping and wailing from whichever son had lost the most recent game.
 
After several episodes of upset, tears, and thrashing about, I wondered whether I should just give the foosball table away. Yet, rather than just avoiding all the competition, I made myself do a little research. After talking to several parents and kids in and outside of our family, I heard the same thing repeatedly: “People need to learn how to deal with these feelings of competition and conflict.” Everyone seemed to be saying that it’s natural to struggle with it, but still necessary to learn how to deal with these feelings.
 
Recently, I walked downstairs to the basement to find two of my boys finishing up a foosball game without too much angst. Tied with each other at 9 to 9, I could tell that each boy hoped to beat the other with just one more goal to reach the maximum of 10 on the built-in scoreboard. As the younger brother beat the older brother, my older son expressed a momentary burst of rage, but his enraged feelings soon dissipated as we briefly talked things through.
 
Later, as I privately discussed the foosball scenario with my younger son who had won the game, he said, “I actually get scared to win because of the reaction I’ll get from [my brother].” I told him not to shy away from winning, but that it takes a big man to learn how to lose well. We had a good laugh after I said how people need to learn how to lose well, but it’s true, isn’t it?
 
To teach our children how to successfully navigate all kinds of personal and social conflict situations, we will focus on the main developmental possibilities for children aged children 6-12 years old that relate to constructive conflict management. To better understand what and how to teach our children in this age range, we continue investigating insights from Dr. Sandra V. Sandy's article entitled, “The Development of Conflict Resolution Skills: Preschool to Adulthood.”
 
Sandy, Sandra V. 2014. “The Development of Conflict Resolution Skills: Preschool to Adulthood.” In Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice, edited by Coleman, Peter T., Morton Deutsch, and Eric C. Marcus, 430-463. San Francisco: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
 
Shifts from Parent-Centered to Peer-Centered During Middle Childhood (6-12) Years
During the middle childhood years, our children spend a lot less time with us and much more time with friends and classmates. This shift demands that our children combine their family-based identities with the school and activity-based identities they are developing outside of the home.
 
As parents, we deal with a lot of change ourselves as our daily influence lessens or competes with our children’s friends and classmates. Rather than force our children to obey our demands, as parents, we might try to appeal to our children’s desire to cooperate. Instead of "Do the dishes because I asked you to, " think of saying, "We all have work to do at home. Please do your part so we can all get the kitchen clean." It helps to remember that our children now have many more competing voices and values beyond the home. To understand and internalize the “rules” or our family values, they are going to need structure, but also respect for their growing independence and autonomy needs.
 
As our kids move into this new stage of development, we can really help our children grow socially and emotionally by respecting their expanding need for independence. Effective parents tend to focus more on discussion and explanation of cause and effect patterns (i.e., "when you yell at me, I tend to want to yell back") to help children understand and improve their behavior and strengthen their internal values and sense of morality.
 
Central Tasks for Social Learning Among Children Ages 6 to 12 Years Old
From 6 to 12 years old, our kids are learning to master social rules, which naturally involves conflict management. As our children move away from the imaginary play of the preschool years, they have more opportunities to learn negotiation, how to settle disagreements, and how to make and enforce rules with their peers. Our children’s conflict resolution skills build and spiral upon each other, remaining heavily influenced by our positive examples and direct instruction.
 
While friends and classmates take on greater influence, parents play a very important role in creating experiences for children to learn how to manage conflict effectively. Specifically, Sandy says that, “although children appear to have some level of innate capacity for certain social-emotional responses, such as empathy and perspective taking, these are frequently hit-or-miss skills unless the child is effectively tutored by an adult. As parents, we still have significant opportunities to help our children build positive conflict resolution skills that directly influence social and academic success.
 
Common Tendencies Among  6 to 12 Year Olds

• Children can make inferences or guesses about other peoples' thoughts and feelings, but they may still have a hard time simultaneously focusing on their own perspective while trying to take the perspective of another person.
• Children in this age group usually believe that one person is responsible for any given conflict.
• Typically, children believe that the person responsible for the conflict should be responsible for resolving it.
• They will still likely have trouble distinguishing their own interests from that of other children (i.e., they often maintain an egocentric viewpoint).
• Boys’ disagreements tend to center around power issues.
• To resolve conflicts, boys tend to focus on getting what they want, whether it is a physical object, social status, or simply dominating.
• Girls’ disagreements tend to center around interpersonal relationships.
• To resolve conflicts, girls tend to rely on aggressive social behavior in relationships like exclusion or gossiping.
• In less structured social situations, children tend to disagree less with friends than with acquaintances.
• In more structured social situations like the classroom, children tend to disagree with friends more than non-friends.
• Preteens tend to think that their failures demonstrate a lack of natural ability and are not related to situational factors such as effort. [This belief leads] to lower expectations for success, negative feelings, and less (p. 450).”

 
Social and Emotional Development Milestones for Effective Conflict Resolution
While we should definitely continue helping our children develop emotional understanding, perspective taking, empathy, and self-control skills during middle childhood, Sandy suggests that we also focus on helping our children in the following four areas:
 

• Creating a Self-Concept with a Positive Belief about Motivation

 

• Developing Positive Self-Esteem

 

• Building Strong Social Relationships

 

• Focusing on Cooperation Rather than Competition

 
We will now explore each of these four areas highlighting Sandy’s most important points.
 
Creating a Self-Concept with a Positive Belief About Motivation
Sandy shares that “The sense of self acquired in early childhood must be further developed or revised to fit a new context in middle childhood” due to new social contexts focused much more on peer interactions.” Naturally,  as our children mature during the elementary and middle school years, they will need to adapt their home-based identities with the roles they play at school and beyond. 
 
From their earliest days, our children are beliefs about their abilities, which heavily influence their personal social, academic, and emotional development and choices. Some children are taught and believe that their talents and abilities are fixed, while others believe that they can change and develop themselves further through factors like effort and persistence. Children who believe that they can influence personal outcomes through effort will likely keep trying even when they have experienced failures or setbacks in trying to accomplish a goal. "So what if I didn't score a goal this season; I'm going to keep practicing throughout the summer so I can come back a better player." 
 
As parents, we play important roles in helping children develop positive beliefs about their abilities to learn and grow. Our children usually develop their core beliefs about developing their abilities through direct and indirect instruction from us:

1. Our children hear and imitate our explanations for our own behavior and personalities. In short, children model how we talk about ourselves.
2. Our children receive direct explanations from us (and other important adults) about our children's behavior, habits, and personalities. 

 
Confirming these ideas, Sandy says, “A parent who explains the child’s behavior by [seeming] fixed characteristics such as genes, ability, or temperament rather than [adjustable] characteristics such as knowledge, effort, or mood often stimulates the child to use similar explanations (p.449).” We are also in excellent positions to adjust difficult social circumstances that may be preventing our children from developing positive ideas and beliefs about their abilities. We should carefully consider how we can help our children who may be struggling to develop a positive belief in themselves. 
 
Developing Positive Self-Esteem
Sandy defines self-esteem as a child’s “ability to control her own future by controlling herself and her environment (p. 450).” With increased time away from parents, our children may start focusing much more on gaining social acceptance from their friends and classmates. Our kids may become painfully aware of their lower social status among their peers. This new social awareness often leads to social comparison that can hammer a child's self-esteem. Think, "Jack's terrible at soccer. Try not to pick him until the very end." These comparisons and difficulties often happen away from home without adults being directly involved.

Yet, while peers play an important role in shaping our children's self-esteem, parents who parent authoritatively (i.e., close, affectionate relationship, but with clearly defined limits) tend to have children with higher self-esteem overall. Children with positive friendships and well-developed group entry skills tend to also have higher self-esteem. We can help children develop self-esteem from several different angles both at home, school. and out in the community.
 
Building Strong Social Relationships
Towards the end of this development stage, around 10 to 11, our children begin depending more on friends to define what is right and wrong. At this later stage, our children are more able to focus on maintaining harmony in their relationships rather than just seeking their own self-interest. Friendships become more central to their social lives rather than just maintaining strong family relationships.
 
Focusing on Cooperation Rather than Cooperation (with Peers and Adults)
Sandy defines cooperation as “the ability to work towards a common goal while coordinating one’s own feelings and perspective with another’s (p. 451).” Many of our children's  activities both in and out of school focus on pitting one child or team against another. For our children who struggle to fit into the group and build positive friendships, they may need us to help create cooperative rather than competitive activities with others. 
 
Generally, our children begin focusing on issues of fairness and develop a belief in strict equality. Due to this focus on equality or fairness, they may struggle to understand giving more than a “fair” share to another person who "doesn't deserve it." In short, children tend to see justice more as an exchange system (i.e., “you worked half as hard as Jack, so you should only get half as much money”). Our children want conflicts to be settled fairly, but tend to believe that conflicts are generated from one guilty party and should be resolved by that same guilty party.

To help out children see beyond their own perspectives, we can create dialogue among our conflicting children. We can help them unravel their conflicts by facilitating perspective taking, emotional understanding, and empathy, which skills maintain equal or even greater importance during the middle childhood years. Without significant adult supervision, our children will naturally need  more sophisticated conflict resolution skills to work through conflicts with their friends and acquaintances independently.
 
Concluding Thoughts
Finally, we should remind ourselves about key areas of child development regarding self-control. While usually considerably more mature than preschoolers, children from ages 6 to 12 are still learning how to regulate their thoughts, emotions, and behavior, usually without direct adult supervision. This regular lack of adult supervision suggests that children must learn to master the “rules” of social norms under new conditions that may be challenging.
 
While Sandy focuses on self-control milestones during her preschool section, the four self-control milestones she mentions remain critical to effective conflict resolution among our 6 to 12 year-old-children.
 
Movement: Prior to age six or seven, children have difficulty in stopping an action already in progress. (Think calling a child to dinner during a favorite show on Netflix).
 
Emotions: Before age four, young children have little control over the intensity of their emotions. (Think throwing a tantrum over burnt toast in the same manner as when the dog just died yesterday).
 
Reflection: Before age six or so, children commonly fail to engage in the reflection necessary to perform well. (Think a negative sharing episode or a failed first bike ride).
 
Gratification: Children under 12 often have difficulty in refusing immediate gratification to wait for a better choice later. (Think gorging on Halloween candy all at once rather than eating just one piece a day).
 
While our 6 to 12-year-old children have grown significantly and are quite self-sufficient in many areas, we may need to remind ourselves that our children may not yet have reached important developmental milestones. As a consequence, we may need to take much smaller steps towards the larger goal children independently resolving conflict in positive ways.
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On our part, we should remember that that these social, emotional, and cognitive skills are often more influenced by experience rather than age. As parents, we can step up and coach our children in these conflict resolution development pillars:  creating a self-concept with a positive belief about motivation, developing positive self-esteem, building strong social relationships, and focusing on cooperation rather than competition.
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Through consistent and thoughtful parent tutoring, we can help our growing children lay the foundation for more sophisticated and complicated social, emotional, and cognitive development as they mature into adulthood. We can take our growing children’s emotional experiences seriously and help them develop more effective habits and behaviors even as their friends and classmates gain more influence in their lives.