Summaries of seven ERIC documents and four journal articles are given. These documents and articles concern issues related to children's social development. (BC)

Distinguishes two aims of morality, the need to avoid trouble and the social requirement to share, and addresses means of achieving them, including conditioning and cultivating dispositions required for sharing. Argues that moralists need to describe sharing situations clearly and transmit the understanding and practice of them to children. (DSK)

Recounts working with a young client in the Serious Habitual Offender Comprehensive Action Program. Client's reflections offer insight into how youth can use significant events in their lives as pathways to more antisocial behavior. Includes Rolf Loeber's (1990) developmental model that describes how children progress from disruptive to criminal…

Investigated stress among low-income African-American mothers as predictor of their instructional strategies for promoting preschoolers' peer relationships. Found that, as stress increased, mothers more frequently used strategies reducing their child's antisocial behavior and less frequently used strategies promoting prosocial behavior. With…

Reports on the development and pilot testing of a multimedia tool (SMART Talk) that teaches anger management, perspective taking, and mediation skills. Results indicate that SMART Talk is popular with both males and females, and its use increases knowledge and practice of prosocial behaviors. (Author/GCP)

Assessed similarities between 192 target children and their friends and nonfriends. Found that children and friends were more similar to one another than nonfriends across the dataset. Friendship similarities were greater in antisocial behavior than in other domains. Similarities between friends in sociometric status and size of the friendship…

Frequency of prosocial and antisocial student behaviors was rated by 1,503 students and 92 teachers in 4 urban middle schools ranked by achievement. The highest achieving school combined academics with a culture of caring, reflected in higher prosocial and lower antisocial behavior rates. Lower achieving schools had higher antisocial behavior…

Describes a kindergarten teacher's successful efforts to create more heterogeneous groupings and less animosity among students in her class. Discusses efforts to encourage after-school visiting among peers, classroom agreements about put-downs and exclusion during play, turn-taking, teacher-assigned grouping, conflict management, efforts to…

Analyzed factors associated with being non-violent and constructing a non-violent, prosocial masculine identity. Subjects were African-American and Hispanic adolescent males in two low-income Chicago neighborhoods. Found several factors associated with being non-violent, including the ability to draw lessons from past experiences and have a…

Describes the concept of a kid-friendly home environment that attracts and welcomes children into the home. Provides a series of simple steps leading to positive relations with children and their friends to create an "open house," as well as a description of the positive effects such an environment has on children. (SD)

Explored preschoolers' emotion regulation skills within a pretend play context using a negatively valenced event designed to elicit a high level of arousal. Found that children's success in continuing pretend play was related to emotion regulation skills in other contexts, whereas their effectiveness at resolving conflict was not. (TJQ)

Saying a kind word to a classmate, acknowledging other students' feelings, sharing books and advice, defending a victim of bullying--these are just a few of the prosocial behaviors that can enhance students' social and academic lives at school. Because children do not develop social values in a vacuum, educators, policymakers, and researchers are…

This study introduces a social context model within which peer acceptances of prosocial-leadership, aggression, and social withdrawal were examined as functions of the contextual norms of these behaviors. The major postulate of the model is that the extent to which a behavior permeates a social context facilitates peer acceptance of the behavior.…

In Roberts and Strayer (1996), we reported that emotional expressiveness and anger were important predictors of empathy for school-age children, and that empathy strongly predicted prosocial behaviors aggregated across methods and sources. In this paper, we report how empathy was associated with direct observations of anger and aggression in peer…

The association between bullying behaviour and academic achievement was investigated in 1016 children from primary schools (6-7-year-olds/year 2: 480; 8-9-year-olds/year 4: 536). Children were individually interviewed about their bullying experiences using a standard interview. Key Stage I National Curriculum results (assessed at the end of year…