A Differential Research Of Preschool Children's Sharing Behavior And Implication

Sharing refers to the behavior of individual's willingness to share resources with others. The emergence and development of sharing is a necessary condition for preschool children to adapt to social life and fulfill their socialization successfully. To study the features of preschool children's sharing behavior in our country, this research, taking social transformation as the background, has compared 3- and 5-year-old children's sharing who are from only child families in western rural areas, multi-child families in western rural areas, only child families in western urban areas and only child families in eastern urban families, respectively. By examining children's nurture in different regions, we try to find out the influence of social culture on children's prosocial behavior and reflect on the value judgment in our modernization process and finally provide some reference to the development and restructure of social culture.To comprehensively examine children's behavior in sharing, we have referred to Rochat, Dias and Guo's research paradigm and devised seven consecutive experiments in which the conditions are as follows:1. Jelly beans can /can't be divided equally;2. Ordinary /special jelly beans;3. Child as a recipient/ non-recipient;4. Child as /not as a chooser of already-divided jelly beansMeanwhile, all participants went through four experiment conditions thoroughly. In this research, we have observed that:1. The 5-year-old children show more altruistic distribution of jelly beans compared to 3-year-old children and there is no gender difference in sharing.2. Nurture affects children's sharing behavior. In the condition of jelly beans can /can't be divided equally and child as the recipient/ non-recipient, children from only child families in western urban areas are significantly more inclined to distribute altruistically in contrast with those from multi-child families in western rural areas.3. Both two factors, namely, whether child is a recipient and whether he/she is a chooser, have significant influence on children's sharing behavior. As a non-recipient and a non-chooser, children behave more altruistically. After experiments we carried out a series of interviews with teachers and parents of the most significantly different groups. The contents include how they view children's sharing behaviors and how they intervene in those behaviors and so on. We found that:1. Ultra-low ratio of teachers to children results in less care for daily cultivation of children's sharing behavior.2. Children have to "strive for" their favored toys because of the deficiency of those materials in their own families.3. Children cast different value on special jelly beans according to the level of their families' economic conditions.4. Only child parents develop children's sharing behavior little by little and encourage them to share with others while multi-child ones dictate their children to share at an early start.5. Generally speaking, children from only child families begin by sharing with counterparts while those from multi-child families by sharing with their siblings, so the only children are more familiar with experimental context than others.6. The only child needs to share given its desire to interact with others while non-only child lacks in such motivation.These results above are to some extent different from those obtained in other cultural backgrounds, which obviously shows that specific social culture has specific influence on children's pre-social behavior development. On one hand, this specialty embodies specific effect of changes in economy system, social structure and social culture; on the other hand, it reflects that we should optimize our nurture in specific social culture to promote children's prosocial development.In the last part, combining the conclusions of this research, we give out some helpful suggestions to parents, teachers and corresponding social parts for cultivating sharing behavior of those children from multi-child families in western rural areas.