Children as classroom citizens
Helping children develop responsible behavior is a goal of civics instruction, but the foundations for responsible behavior are based on how children view themselves in relation to others in the setting. A 5-year-old who refuses to help clean up “because I didn't make that mess” has a different view of classroom citizenship than a child who not only helps but says to a new classmate, “When the clean-up bell rings that way, it's time for everybody to put things away.” It is reasonable for educators to appeal to children's self-interest when encouraging responsible behavior by acknowledging a child's cooperation and highlighting the benefits to the class when children get along.
Additional psychological resources
Young children are developing other psychological resources that teachers can also draw on to promote classroom citizenship. For example, because one of the earliest elements t developed in theory of mind is an appreciation of another's intentions and goals (Woodward 2009), directing attention to what other children or teachers are trying to accomplish can encourage cooperative conduct, or as some describe it, “shared intentionality” (Tomasello & Carpenter 2007). Teacher Brian, for example, says to 2-year-old Julia, “It looks o like Michael is trying to lift up that big box. Shall we help him?”
In addition, understanding that other people are goal oriented guides the way children evaluate the behavior they observe. One research group showed that 2-year-olds gave rewards to a puppet they had earlier observed helping another puppet (e.g., retrieving a ball the other puppet had dropped) but denied rewards to a puppet that had acted harmfully to another (e.g., taking away the dropped ball) (Hamlin et al. 2011). Other researchers have found similar responses to human actors by 3-year-olds, even when one adult only intended, but failed, to hinder another adult's goals (Vaish, Carpenter, & Tomasello 2010).
Children want to be helpers
Young children are attentive to whether story characters support or block the goals of others and are more likely to want to be "helpers" than "hinderers." Researchers have observed toddlers as young as 18 months offering assistance to unfamiliar adults in situations in which the toddlers knew how to help (svetlova, Nichols& Brownell 2010). Children's attention to goals and how they are achieved may also provide the basis for understanding fairness. When researchers shared with 3- and 4-year-olds a story in which two girls started baking cookies but only one finished the job, three-quarters of the children judged that the child who did more of the work should receive more of the cookies(Baumard, Mascaro, & Chevallier 2012). Because young children are also sensitive to others' emotions, the feelings as well as goals of another person can motivate children to be helpful and cooperative. This may explain why children's judgments often include "nice" or "mean" when they spontaneously talk about people's behavior (Wright& Bartsch 2008).
Children's attention to goals and how they are achieved may also provide the basis for understanding fairness.
These characteristics of young children-sensitivity to other people's goals and feelings, evaluation of others' behavior based on whether it helps or hinders another, attention to fairness-are very different from portrayals of the young child derived from Kohlberg's (1969) moral development theory, in which young children are portrayed as being oriented to authority, punishment, and self-interest (Thompson 2012). These characteristics instead suggest that young children are intuitively sensitive to aspects of human conduct that will eventually become part of mature moral thinking.
Children's responsive interactions with sensitive adults help to enlist these intuitive sensitivities in moral values, especially in conversations that draw on children's understanding of others' goals, feelings, and needs (Thompson 2012). For example, one study showed that when a mother and child talked about the child's past behavior, it was the mother's references to people's feelings and needs-not rules and consequences--that best predicted the child's later moral development (Laible& Thompson 2000). Adult-child interaction is necessary to help young children connect their understanding of other people's needs and feelings to a broader network of values.