Playing with conflict: a longitudinal study of varieties of spontaneous verbal conflict during mother-child interaction at home

Although conflict is central to major developmental theories, relatively little is known about the ways in which young children and caregivers argue at home. The existing psychological research focuses narrowly on serious, ‘problem-solving’ conflicts. In contrast, this in-depth longitudinal study describes varieties of spontaneous conflict talk occurring at home between nine middle-class Caucasian American mothers and their 2- to 4-year-old children. All dyads produced conflicts with nonse-rious, imaginary and/or ritual markings for a mean of 31% (± 2.8%) of all mother-child conflicts. Overall, most mother-child marked conflicts were nonserious, but the percentage of marked conflicts that were imaginary increased with age. Mothers used marked conflicts to manage ongoing problematic interactions with their children, while children apparently introduced marked conflicts primarily during play. Available data on child-child conflicts showed that some of these conflicts also were marked and were introduced primarily during play. Implications for how varieties of conflict may contribute to social competence within the family and peer group are discussed.