Examining Children's Apologies in the Preschool Classroom

Abstract

Although acts of apology are learned early in development and play a fundamental role in repairing interpersonal relationships, most children's apology research is not based on naturally occurring child apologies but on children's impressions of adult actors, hypothetical peers, or story characters apologizing for transgressions. This study focused on closing the gaps between the current understanding of young children's impressions of apologies and their actual apologetic behavior by examining 3- to 5-year-old children's naturally occurring peer apologies in two preschool classrooms. An apology coding frame was created to account for verbal and nonverbal apologetic communication behaviors and social repair was measured using forgiveness markers, a peer likeability sorting task, and the time it took to return to play following each conflict. Responses from child participant interviews and parent and teacher surveys were used to evaluate differences in child participants' ideas about apologies, their actual apologetic communication behaviors, and parent and teacher expectations. Findings add to the broader understanding of early apologetic behavior by (a) confirming that preschoolers' verbal apology use is positively associated with peer likability in a natural setting, (b) offering new insights into preschooler's apologetic communication tendencies by substantiating how preschool children use nonverbal apologetic behaviors at a significantly higher rate than verbal apologetic behaviors, and (c) documenting differences between preschool children's understanding of apologies and their apologetic tendencies following actual peer conflicts.