Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Talking With Young Children About Social Ideas, Carolyn P. Edwards, Mary Ellin Logue, Anna Sargent Russell

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

During the early childhood years, children’s understanding of many social and moral issues undergoes immense changes. We became interested in learning more about these changes and supporting them through our laboratory preschool curriculum. One major change, for example, is that children come to classify themselves and others into sex, age, and kinship categories and to learn social role expectations. Children also show greatly deepened understanding of such moral issues as fair sharing, obedience, authority, and friendship.

These areas of development are part of what can be called social cognition, or “children’s understanding of social behavior—what children think about their own …