Social, Emotional, and Cognitive Child Development Milestones for Constructive Conflict Resolution among Preschoolers

Three-year-old Sarah has just taken five-year-old Jack’s favorite toy and has run to her room to play with it alone. You’ve heard Sarah complain to you that she never gets to play with Jack’s remote control car, but she’s taken the toy without permission. You find Jack screaming and Sarah refusing to open her bedroom door for you or her brother. You understand Sarah’s feelings, but you also want to teach her respect for other people’s property. Here is a situation that demands teaching not only property rights, but also emotional understanding, perspective taking, empathy, and self-control. You will probably not choose to teach all of the skills at once, but instead of just focusing on property rights, you might want to consider teaching fundamental social and emotional skills, too.  
 
In this post, we will focus on the developmental possibilities for preschool aged children (3-5 years old) to learn four identified social and emotional skills that undergird constructive conflict management. To better understand what and how to teach preschoolers, 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.
 
Social-Emotional Pillars for Effective Conflict Resolution
From Sandy’s article, we focus on just four essential social-emotional skills that serve as anchors for our children’s behavior in conflict situations. Parents can begin cultivating these essential skills in their children from a very young age. These four skills include:
 
Emotional Understanding

• The ability to understand and express your own feelings AND the ability to understand and pay attention to another person’s verbal and non-verbally expressed emotions.

​Perspective Taking

• The ability to view a situation from an alternate viewpoint.

Empathy

• The ability to sense other people's emotions and imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.

Self-Control

• The ability to monitor and control our own behavior, emotions, or thoughts in different situations.

 
Central Task for Social Learning Among Preschoolers: Emotional Maturation
 
Sandy identifies emotional maturation as the most important task of early childhood. Additionally, 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. Since interpersonal understanding is influenced more by experience than by age, a three-year old can be at a higher development level than a six-year old.”
 
Parents and caregivers play a critical role in helping preschoolers develop these four essential skills. Before exploring developmental milestones related to each of these skills, we will briefly discuss keys to teaching preschoolers and present a few main reasons why children’s early learning years between 0-5 years old is so important in the grand scheme of social and emotional development.
 
Keys to Teaching Preschoolers Conflict Resolution Skills

• Consider both Modeling and Direct Instruction: Parents should not only teach by example, but through direct instruction and tutoring. Many skills like empathy require direct instruction and practice, rather than absorption by mere observation.
• Use Direct Instruction of Cause-and-Effect Sequences: “Children need instruction in cause-and-effect sequences before they can separate right from wrong or unintentional from intended harm.”
• Appreciate Children’s Expanding Autonomy Needs: Parents should not try to squelch the autonomy needs of the child to satisfy parent desire for compliance. Parents may need to reconsider their expectations around child behavior and demands.
• Reduce Children’s Stress Levels: Parents and other adult caregivers should try to reduce stress for children. Stress provokes defense mechanisms, which makes it difficult for learning to take place.
• Respect Limited Concentration Time: Preschoolers do best with learning during a maximum of four to six minutes of direct instruction.
• Allow for Unstructured Play and Down Time: After receiving direct training, children need creative time and space to create meaning. This requires unstructured play time and participation in seemingly meaningless activities.
• Avoid Overly Harsh Discipline: Stressful methods of disciplining children, such as arguing, yelling, and being overly harsh, rewire the brain and are associated with greater impulsiveness, over-arousal, and aggressiveness.

Why Focus on Teaching Constructive Communication Skills During Early Childhood (0 to 5 years old)?

• Neuroscientific research suggests that the first forty-eight months of a child’s life are the time of greatest growth spurts in all areas of development.
• Parents and teachers will find it easiest to set constructive patterns when our children’s brains are more flexible and enjoy the greatest capacity for change (this brain flexibility and capacity to change decrease over time). It is much more difficult to relearn more constructive patterns rather than learning correct patterns from an early age.
• Parents usually have the most time teaching their children during the preschool-aged years. Coupled with the fact that children learn the most from their most important relationships, this stage offers prime socializing and other types of socio-emotional learning.
• Young children are much more capable of learning social and emotional skills than classical theorists once thought. There is great untapped potential in preschool-aged children who tend to look to adult caregivers for direction and training.

Emotional Understanding
As parents, we often demand that our children understand and respect other people’s feelings (including our own), but first our children need to be able to appropriately express and understand their own feelings. To develop the more sophisticated traits of perspective taking and empathy, we must first help our children understand and express their own emotions in constructive ways. This is the basis of all further emotional understanding and maturity.
 
In terms of developing emotional understanding, Sandy identifies the following constraints in development:
 

• Preschoolers often have difficulty understanding cause-and-effect sequences and have a hard time differentiating their point of view from another person’s.

 

• Preschoolers may often have an equally intense emotional reaction to either a large or small conflict or disturbance.

 

• Young children may have a hard time focusing on motives, but instead focus on outcomes.

 

• Preschoolers are often unable to provide justifications for their judgments.

 

• Around 4-5 years old, preschoolers tend to base their justifications on external factors like age, physical size, or gender.

 
Each of these points emphasize the need for specific, targeted teaching to our young children. We can help coach our children in the right direction while not expecting too much too soon from our young, developing people.
 
Perspective Taking and Empathy
 
In the past, child development theorists did not believe little children capable of empathy largely because they believed that children younger than six or seven are unable to see more than one side to a conflict. Theorists believed that without the ability to see beyond their own viewpoint, children could not take the perspective of another person or understand the feelings of another person.
 
Yet, more modern research has suggested that young children are not only capable of perspective taking and empathy, but develop these abilities alongside a development trajectory. Yet, this trajectory is significantly associated with parent tutoring and child experience. As suggested previously, a young child of 3 may have developed greater empathy than a 6-year old based on parent involvement and constructive experience with empathy. In short, nurture significantly influences a child in this area of emotional development.
 

• At about 2-years-old, children may begin demonstrating comforting behavior to others. They can understand when other people are upset, but they often lack the ability to understand another person’s feelings. Toddlers often try to comfort others via means they find personally comforting.

 

• Around 3-5 years old, children begin showing more empathy to friends rather than to other children. They also can begin considering their level of knowledge in relation to children who are younger than themselves.

 

• Generally, children need to be able to understand and express their own emotions before they can understand other people’s emotions and perspectives.

 
In terms of parenting per our children’s development, we should consider the following about general perspective taking abilities:
 

• Preschoolers tend to assume that other people see situations the way they do.

 

• Preschoolers often lack the ability to distinguish between their own perspective and another person’s. Parents should assume that this is a difficult skill for preschoolers.

 
Rather than accuse our children of selfishness or egocentrism, we can gently, but deliberately, nurture the idea of diverse perspectives and feelings. In the meantime, while preschoolers’ brains needs time to mature, young children are very capable of imitating empathetic behavior. See Siddiqui and Ross (2004), Smith and Ross (2007), Ross and Lazinski (2014) for research on the potential for young children to take the perspective of another and to empathize through imitation of constructive parent and sibling conflict behavior.
 
Self-Control
 
Naturally, with surging emotions and expanding autonomy, preschoolers are in the thick of learning how to regulate their thoughts, emotions, and behavior. To better understand developmental constraints or milestones surrounding self-control, Sandy directly quotes Maccoby (1980) who identified four forms of self-control or inhibition milestones in childhood:
 
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).
 
As you can see, preschoolers are often not capable of self-regulating in the ways we desire for them. When we ask our preschooler to switch gears in the middle of a task, or stop crying over something small, we need to recognize that our children may not yet be developmentally capable of what we are asking of them. In patience, we can remind ourselves that our children may be trying the best they can so we need to take incremental steps to help them towards the overall goal of emotional maturity.
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As parents, we can certainly do our part and carefully consider the fact that these skills are often more influenced by experience rather than age. In short, we can step up and tutor our children in these most fundamental conflict resolution skills of emotional understanding, perspective taking, empathy, and self-control to help our children develop up to their full potential.