“Two for Flinching”: Children's and Adolescents' Narrative Accounts of Harming Their Friends and Siblings

Abstract

This study investigated differences in children's and adolescents' experiences of harming their siblings and friends. Participants (N = 101; 7-, 11-, and 16-year-olds) provided accounts of events when they hurt a younger sibling and a friend. Harm against friends was described as unusual, unforeseeable, and circumstantial. By contrast, harm against siblings was described as typical, ruthless, angry, and provoked, but also elicited more negative moral judgments and more feelings of remorse and regret. Whereas younger children were more self-oriented with siblings and other-oriented with friends, accounts of harm across relationships became somewhat more similar with age. Results provide insight into how these two relationships serve as distinct contexts for sociomoral development.

Continuities and Discontinuities in the Development of Moral Judgments

“…Through narrative accounts of children's (7, 11, and 16 years) own transgressions, the researchers documented that instances of harm between friends were "unusual, unforeseeable, and circumstantial" [Recchia, Wainryb, & Pasupathi, 2013, p. 1459, while instances of harm to siblings were not uncommon. Children and adolescents described their own actions entailing harm to siblings as more ruthless than the harm caused to friends.…”

“…Harm against friends was relationship oriented, whereas harm toward siblings was more explicitly offensive and property oriented. With age, the form of harm across relationships shifted from damage to property toward psychological insensitivity [Recchia et al, 2013]. It is significant, we believe, that in the body of research on children's narrative accounts of their own experiences of harming others (or being harmed by others), similar judgments were made as in responses to hypothetical situations about harm.…”

Saints, and the Rest of Us: Broadening the Perspective on Moral Identity Development

“…Our own work reveals that, across childhood and adolescence, children begin to think about their own wrongdoing with increasing sophistication and complexity [Recchia et al, 2013Wainryb et al, 2005;. That complexity includes an increasing emphasis on the psychological aspects of experiences [Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010b] such as the goals, beliefs, and emotions that undergird their actions and help them make sense of them.…”

“…Although the life story in its full form is a developmental achievement of late adolescence and early adulthood [Habermas & Bluck, 2000], research on children's autobiographical narration has shown that children as young as 5 can construct meaningful accounts of their experiences [Fivush & Nelson, 2004;Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010b;Reese, Yan, Jack, & Hayne, 2010]. More-over, work in our laboratory has shown more specifically that, starting at least at the age of 5, children can construct fairly coherent narrative accounts of their own morally-laden experiences [Recchia, Wainryb, Bourne, & Pasupathi, 2015;Recchia, Wainryb, & Pasupathi, 2013;Wainryb, Brehl, & Matwin, 2005;Wainryb, Komolova, & Brehl, 2014].…”

Regulating emotion and identity by narrating harm

“…Such experiences entail negative emotions like anger, sadness, guilt, and shame, and challenge our views of ourselves and others as morally upright. Narrative construction of these experiences can help to regulate emotion and identity implications, but not always in adaptive ways (Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010; Recchia, Wainryb, & Pasupathi, 2013). For example, experiences of harm can be narrated in ways that construct a sense of the potential for growth, increased understanding of ourselves and important others in our lives, and as imperfect but still fundamentally good human beings (Mansfield et al, 2010; Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010; Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2010).…”