Children's understanding of the social and biological contributors to kinship relations

Several studies explore children's emergent understanding of kinship bonds and test the hypothesis that preschoolers, much like 9-year-olds, are capable of making organized, consistent distinctions about the kinds of properties that family relationships entail.;In Study 1, 4-year-olds and 9-year-olds responded to four interviews, each targeting a different child-based relationship (identical twins, sisters, friends, strangers). For each interview, participants predicted what kinds of properties ("genetic", "individual", "socio-cultural") might be shared in each relationship, then predicted the causal root (inborn or acquired) of each property. All participants correctly identified "genetic" properties as inborn and "socio-cultural" properties as acquired. In the case of twins, sisters, and strangers, preschoolers and fourth graders showed a similar response pattern, the main difference being that fourth graders were more conservative overall in their responses, and were better able to distinguish between sisters and twins. In the case of friendship, fourth graders correctly identified that two friends would likely share social (but not genetic or individual) properties, while preschoolers overestimated the degree to which friends would share genetic and individual traits. This result is discussed in terms of the changing experiential quality of friendship as children mature. Study 2, which included a week-long educational intervention for preschoolers, showed a similar pattern of results.;Study 3 investigated children's understanding of adult-centered family relationships: husband-wife and parent-child. All participants showed good understanding of the parent-child relationship, and claimed that a child would more resemble her mother than her father. Both preschoolers and fourth graders showed confusion about the nature of the spousal relationship, and tended to overestimate the degree to which a husband and wife would be genetically similar, indicating that true understanding of this relationship may not emerge until early adolescence. Once again, preschoolers competently differentiated inborn for acquired properties.;Previous research in the area of biological reasoning has suggested that young children are unable to differentiate social from biological causal forces. Several theorists concluded that there occurs a "critical shift" in reasoning ability at age 9, after which children are able to conceptualize the natural world in a more systematic, truly scientific way. Taken together, these studies show no evidence of any "critical shift" in cognitive ability. Except for the case of friendship, preschoolers' response pattern differed from fourth graders' in terms of degree, not kind. I propose that what eventually develops is a Cultural Schema of Biology, rather than any deep understanding of biological principles.