The Relationship Of Children’s Persuasive Strategies, Theory Of Mind And Parenting Styles

Children’s persuasive strategies are an important part of social communicativeskills. The development of children’s persuasive strategies is beneficial for bettersocial adaptation and good relationships with others. At present, studies on children’spersuasive strategies and its factors from internal and aboard are insufficient toprovide enough references for fostering children’s persuasive skills and verbalcommunication skills. Therefore, this study was designed to abundant researches inthis area. One purpose of the study was to explore how the development of children’spersuasive strategies varied as a function of age, gender. Another was to explore therelationships between children’s persuasive strategies, theory of mind and parentingstyle.136three-and six-years old children took part in the assumed persuasion tasksand were also given a battery of conflict desire,first-order and second-order falsebelief tests. The children’s parents filled the parenting style questionnaire.The resultsare as follows:1.The proportion of no response and lower negative strategies such ascommanding and denying continue to reduce with age, the proportion of new plans,explaining, altruism and other higher positive strategies continue to improve with age.Overall, the level of persuasive strategies used by children had a significant agedifference. The age of4to6is the important period of the development of persuasivestrategies. But during the whole early childhood, the most commonly persuasivestrategy is politely asking,which is in the lower positive level. Gender differences inthe level of strategies to persuade were not significant.2.Development of the theory of mind is significantly positive related to thedevelopment of their persuasive strategies,which means that the more children canunderstand one’s desires and beliefs,the better they can persuade.3.There is a significant positive correlation between the development ofpersuasive strategies and authoritative parenting style like warm acceptance, beingreason-able,democracy;a significant negative correlation with its non-reasoningpunitive authoritarian parenting style.4.Children’s theory of mind was a part mediator between parenting style andtheir persuasive strategies. Democratic participation would partly benefit thedevelopment of children’s persuasive strategies through promoting the developmentof theory of mind. No reasoning punishment would partly hinder the development ofpersuasive strategies by preventing the development of theory of mind.