“She should get her own cat”: Parent‐child conversations about ownership and sharing

Abstract

The present study uses a book-reading method to investigate how parents and young children discuss property interactions. 64 parent-child dyads considered 10 stories about different kinds of property interactions. 32 dyads included 2-year-olds and 32 included 4-year-olds. Dyads were of American, majority White, and a higher SES background. We discovered trade-offs in parent-child talk, wherein some property scenarios (e.g., trick-taking) promoted more talk about ownership, whereas others (e.g., borrowing) promoted more talk about sharing. We also document, for potentially the first time, which interactions elicit parent-child talk about the non-obvious history of possessions. Throughout their conversations, parents and children conversations revealed how successful reasoning about property interactions relies on a multi-part construal that includes not only the owner and their rights, but also the nature of the object, and the broader socio-moral context. Finally, we found that parents were more likely to discuss ownership concepts with younger children than older children, and that 4-year-olds were more sensitive to how different property interactions violated (or did not violate) owners’ rights than 2-year-olds. We suggest that 2-year-olds’ general approval of most exchanges may have led parents to highlight the ways different exchanges affected the owner. Together, these findings shed light on how parents and children engage with complex social-moral issues surrounding property interactions.