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In our new Begininngs Workshop book, Behavior, Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Diane Levin discuss helping children handle conflict in their article, "When Push Comes to Shove: Reconsidering Children's Conflicts." In this article they observe . . .

"Children build ideas about conflict and how to resolve it through a slow process of construction. They take what they see and hear about conflict and actively transform it into something that has meaning for them; they try out their ideas, see how they work, and modify them . . . . Just as children learn to read and write from being in environments rich with print and opportunities to experiment with it, they learn conflict resolution skills from the environment and from trying out the skills they see in a wide range of situations. Because of this, preventing children from having conflicts is not always the best approach; they need opportunities to experience conflicts and then lots of ideas about possible ways to resolve them.

"Young children are just beginning to construct what will eventually become mature adult concepts about conflict and conflict resolution. Their understanding goes through a long, slow progression and is very different from that of adults. For them, conflicts and their solutions are often seen in concrete terms and from one point of view. Children often focus on one aspect of a situation at a time, not seeing the relationships of the parts of a conflict to the whole. It is often hard for them to think about the beginning (conflict), middle (negotiation), and end (solution) in any logically interconnected way . . .

"Many of the ways commonly used by teachers to deal with conflicts in the classroom do not fully address the needs of children today brought about by changes in the last 10 years. Most focus on stopping conflicts as quickly as possible so that regular classroom life can continue. For instance, the practice of sending children to time out stops a conflict, but it does not help the children learn any alternative ways for resolving their conflict. When we tell children to use words instead of fists, we are not helping them learn the actual words they might use. Both approaches do little to give children the data they need to build up their repertoire of nonviolent conflict resolution skills."

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