Knowing when a dispute has been resolved is hard for all of us. We’re looking at how very young children manage this. 

We have been looking at how children in a multicultural, multilingual preschool manage conflicts and disputes and how they resolve these conflicts, often harmoniously and without adult intervention. Our hypothesis is that these strategies directly impact on children’s wellbeing and belonging in their early years. Our study, ‘War and Peace in the Nursery’, is based on 18 months of non-participant video observation in a community of children aged 2;6 - 4;11. In this talk, we give a short overview of the study, and focus particularly on how some children use humour (among several other strategies) as a cue of conflict resolution, and the implications it has for social hierarchies and social harmony in the centre.

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Zoom link: https://vuw.zoom.us/j/3030341428

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