Learning The Rules: The Anatomy Of Children's Relationships (Personal Relationships)

I found the book to be a real gem. It offers direct entry into children's understanding of social reality from the perspective of interpersonal relationships with parents, siblings, friends, peers, and other adults. As importantly, the authors offer a strong rationale for taking children's commentaries seriously and coherent sociological analysis that brings meaning to children's outlooks. One rarely finds such integrated scholarship that blends a careful reading of developmental psychology with a creative use of micro sociological analysis. This book will become the mark against which other studies of relationships will be judged and it will be essential reading for researchers in the area of relationships. At last we are given an epistemology that does not simply take the 'reality' of the subject or object for granted. These authors take to heart that reality is a social construction that emerges within a complement of relationships and is structured for a sociological world that is populated by parents and peers, parents, siblings, and friends. Learning the Rules has made me rethink my understanding of relationships and stimulated enough ideas for research to carry me into my old age. --James Youniss, Ph.D., Director, Life Cycle Institute and Professor of Psychology, The Catholic University of America

Using intensive interviews with nearly a thousand children, Bigelow, Tesson, and Lewko have convincingly demonstrated that children construct differentiated bodies of rules that enable them to adequately interact with parents, siblings, peers, or close friends in ways that conform to the demands of the particular relationships. In the authors' detailed dissection of children's relationships, they have revealed that children are sophisticated relationship philosophers who have clear understanding of to whom one shows respect, for whom you give your best, with whom you had better keep secrets, and so on. Counter-intuitive and surprising results are yielded by Bigelow, Tesson, and Lewko's analyses; the authors uncovered that children do not behave in the stereotyped ways that superficial conceptions of relationships patterns imply. While the Piaget-Sullivan hypothesis claimed a clear structural distinction between the unilateral parent-child relationship and the symmetrical, cooperative child-peer relationship, this careful contextual study of how children maintain these relationships underscores that this distinction does not account for the multifaceted social reality within these relationships. New pictures of the parent-child as well as the close-friend relationship emerge from children's descriptions revealing that features of compliance and cooperation characterize both uni- and bi-lateral relationships. Obviously, these relationships must not primarily compensate each other's deficits rather than mutually support their respective contributions to children's's development. --Lothar Krappmann, Ph.D., Max-Planck-Institut fuer Bildungsforschung (Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education, Berlin, F.R.G.

Geoffrey Tesson received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1982 and is currently Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and a member of the Centre for Research in Human Development and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Laurential University, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. He has contributed chapters on socialization and development to various volumes, including K. Anderson, et al., Family Matters, J. A. Meacham, Interpersonal Relations: Family, Peers, Friends, J. Lafontant, L'Initiation thematique a la sociologie, and P. Anisef and P. Axelrod, Transitions: Schooling and Employment in Canada. He has co-authored, with Brian Bigelow and John Lewko, previous papers on the development of social rules in children and adolescents.

John H. Lewko, Ph.D., is Professor and Director of the Centre for Research in Human Development at Laurentian University. His launching of the current social rules research program has led to more recent work on mental models and decision-making related to risk perception and changes in adolescent risky behaviors.