Children's Concepts of How People Get Babies

Abstract

BERNSTEIN, ANNE C., and COWAN, PHILIP A. Children's Concepts of How People Get Babies. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1975, 46, 77-91. 20 boys and girls at each of 3 age levels (3-4, 7-8, 11-12) were given a newly constructed interview focusing on their concepts of how people get babies (social causality). They were also given Piaget-type tasks assessing physical conservation-identity (Clay), physical causality (Origin of Night), and a new social identity task (Lemke 1973). Performance on all tasks systematically increased with age, intercorrelations were high, and children tended to perform at the same absolute cognitive level on each task. Children's concepts of how people get babies appears to follow a Piagetian developmental sequence embedded in a matrix of social and physical causality and identity concepts. There also appears to be a consistent developmental lag in which physical causality precedes physical conservation-identity, which in turn precedes social identity: the Origin of Babies appears to be the most developmentally difficult of the 4 tasks. A qualitative analysis supported Piaget's interactive theory of development. Sex information is not simply taken in by children; it is assimilated (transformed) to the child's present cognitive level.