Learning the Rules: The Anatomy of Children's Relationships

Abstract

Learning the Rules: The Anatomy of Children's Relationships. Brian J. Bigelow, Geoffrey Tesson, & John H. Lewko. New York: Guilford Press. 1996. 255 pp. Hardcover ISBN 157230-084-1. $35.00 cloth. This book about children's relationships focuses on what relationships mean to children and how children manage them. Brian Bigelow, Geoffrey Tesson, and John Lewko assert that the field of peer relationships has been virtually dominated by research on children's social behavior. Although this has been important, it has left a gap in our understanding of relationships by overlooking how children actually construct their relationships. The authors make an impressive start to filling this gap by examining the social rules that children follow in their relationships. Throughout the book, the authors emphasize that individuals actively construct relationships, and much of what constitutes a relationship lies in the meaning that members accord it. After presenting the empirical and theoretical background for their work, Bigelow, Tesson, and Lewko briefly describe the methodology they used to discover children's social rules. This involved in-depth interviewing adapted from Kiss's (1972) recursive concept analysis. More complete details regarding the methodology are provided in Appendices 1 and 2. The reader is advised to review these appendices in conjunction with the early chapters. This information is important when considering the results reported throughout the rest of the book because in these appendices the demographics of the sample (e.g., 95% of the participants were members of two-parent families) are described. Reading the appendices also gives a sense of how carefully the methodology was designed. Particularly noteworthy is that the investigators used six children (peer investigators) to help develop their interviewing procedure. A rich set of data regarding social rules was obtained from almost 1,000 children, ages 6-13 years, in an attempt to understand how they apply rules across different types of social relationships. In a series of tables in Chapter 3, the 15 major social rules themes are presented, as well as data regarding the occurrences of the social rule theme by social domain (family, peers, other adults), age, and sex. In addition, items from a social rules checklist, based on the social rules suggested by children, are presented, along with data regarding the mean ratings of the social rule themes by relationship, age, and sex. These data are further described in chapters in which children's social rules are examined with respect to compliance and autonomy, self-control and conflict management, mutual activities and obligation. The social rules are discussed at the macro level-which generally addresses overarching structural issues, such as compliance, that were investigated in terms of rule themes across social domains-and at the micro level-which examined specific rules within particular relationships (e. …