Young children breaking the rules: a sociocultural interpretation

Abstract

In this article, I explore why young children challenge and break adults' rules. I briefly review others' explanations of this phenomenon and draw on my doctorate study to offer teachers an alternative way of understanding this more challenging aspect of children's behaviour. My study investigated how young children learn to be part of the group and, using a sociocultural framework, I carried out a qualitative case study at an early childhood centre in New Zealand. My observations provide many detailed descriptions of the rules that induct young children into group culture, but also children's continued resistance to these rules. The frequency of children's resistance led me to reflect on why they resist or accept adults' messages. Rules guide socialisation and enculturation Sociocultural theories propose that all learning, including socialisation, begins at the interpersonal level as we participate in daily life. Vygotsky (1978) says that social experience is internalised to form individual understandings and meaning-making systems at the intrapersonal level. This means that the self or individual is sociological in nature and formation, or to put it more simply, people are created by people. William Corsaro (2000) proposes that it is the right of every child to know the rules of the culture and society they belong to. While children have the right to know the rules, we cannot assume that socialisation will always involve willing teachers and eager learners. In fact, we have much to learn about why young children accept or reject adults' messages and rules. Cultures create and implement rules as a means of socialising new members into the group (Vygotsky, 1978), and this sociocultural interpretation of enculturation offers an explanation as to why experienced members, like adults, expend a significant amount of time and energy ensuring that new members, like children, abide by the rules of each culture. Competing voices Today, sociologists and psychologists are reviewing their understandings of the many ways that young children are affected by the voices of multiple sources. Children are subjected to a bombardment of suggestions and directives from the people they live and interact with across a range of settings. Even very young children are asked to negotiate rules in more than one setting on a daily basis, for example, at home and at the childcare centre. Rules often compete with each other and are further complicated by messages that arrive via contemporary, tools, such as media and television (Brennan, 2001, 2002). Observations from my study indicate that children use a range of innovative and creative strategies to accommodate this circumstance. These children continued to challenge adults' rules and, at first, this behaviour seemed surprising, as compliance offers many benefits, such as valued group membership and positive relationships with both adults and peers. Life is easier for children when they abide by the rules, and security and acceptance are gained in meeting others' expectations. However, in spite of these benefits, the young children in my study continued to resist, modify, and manipulate adults' rules. Children's strategies included: adapting existing rules to meet their own purposes; subverting the group's or adult's goals to pursue their own goals; and distracting the messenger to avoid or dilute the instruction. As beginning members, children demonstrated sophisticated responses to their compulsory participation in a culture that others had created for them. For example, even very young children balanced rule subversion with compliance, a strategy I interpreted as a means of ensuring that valued relationships were not unduly jeopardised by their challenges to adults' authority (Brennan, 2005). Mediating the culture Leont'ev (1978) views such behaviours as cultural mediating devices (p. …