Children fight about a lot of things, but near the top of that list for those under the age of 10 is the sharing of toys, which can be a major source of conflict among siblings and other children around the same age.
That's why one UFV professor is embarking on a multi-year journey to try and figure out if there's a way that parents and guardians can help reduce the number of fights that occur due to the sharing of toys or other possessions.
In addition to being an assistant professor of psychology, Dr. Madison Pesowski is also the director of the UFV's Kids in Developmental Science Lab and has spent a long time studying how much young children can perceive and at what age they first begin to understand certain concepts.
She now hopes to begin the latest branch of her academic journey, which will focus on at what point kids start to comprehend the idea of ownership.
"The long-held misunderstanding is that when two children fight over a wooden block, they just don’t know any better,” Pesowski said. “My research suggests that’s not true, and this project will explore how they reason about ownership in general.”
She first developed an interest in this topic after spending some time working as an educator for young children.
"I noticed these arguments where one kid had a toy, and another came and took it. That led to screaming and fighting, and got me thinking about what they were thinking. Later, when I did my honours work at the University of Waterloo with a faculty member who was interested in the concept of ownership, I started thinking about how I’d answer some of the questions I had."
In order to get some much-needed answers regarding this topic, Pesoski plans to engage in a five-year study where she will work with young children and give them a series of activities to complete to learn what idea of ownership they already possess and how they process it.
"If children believe that it's always wrong for people to interact with others' property, then they should say that every action is bad, even if it doesn't involve physically interacting with the object. But if children consider how it impacts the owner, they should be more likely to say that actions that cause temporary or severe outcomes, like modifying or taking something, are worse than actions that don't impact the owner, like simply looking at it," Pesoski explained.
While this project will be a great benefit to Pesowski as well as parents and caretakers all around the world, she said that she expects it to also be very impactful on the team of seven UFV students who are helping her conduct this study.
"They’ll learn about what kinds of methods they can and can’t use, they’ll be in the community connecting with preschools and daycares. They’ll input and analyze data. They’ll get the whole picture of what research is about, and that’s exciting."
This multi-year project was funded, in part, with a $182,500 grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
