Adults' Responses to Young Children's Transgressions: A New Method for Understanding Everyday Social Interactions

Young children's misbehaviours can be challenging to interpret, evaluate, and intervene on. In turn, adults' interventions on children's transgressions inform children about how others view their actions. In the current research, we examined adult responses to recordings of everyday transgressions committed by young children. This research adopted a new method for assessing adults' interpretations, evaluations, and proposed interventions in response to children's transgressions. In two studies, participants watched videos of young children engaging in actions that could be considered wrong, such as hitting someone else or making a mess. Across both studies, adults expressed uncertainty about how to interpret children's transgressions. Different transgressions led adults to make different intention attributions and evaluations, which in turn related to how they said they would intervene on the child's behaviour. This research has implications for early childhood educators, and develops a new tool for investigating these implications.