Kids Know if Parents Have Been Naughty or Nice

Children as young as 5 or 6 can sense when Mommy and Daddy have made up after a spat, even if they don’t see the resolution occur, new research suggests.

Children watched videotapes that included simulated arguments between a man and a woman. Their reactions to disputes that were apparently resolved off-camera were compared to how they felt after viewing disputes with no resolution.

The children showed less anger if the adults disappeared behind closed doors and later emerged acting friendly. Boys, but not girls, also showed a reduction in sadness.

Children also showed less anger and sadness after viewing different tapes that included an argument followed by a scene in which one of the participating adults briefly explained that the dispute had been resolved.

When viewing the tapes in which the adults went behind the closed doors, about half the children ages 5 and 6 guessed when the adults disappeared that they were resolving their differences, and “that’s pretty amazing,” said researcher E. Mark Cummings of West Virginia University in Morgantown.

About 90% of children ages 9 and 10 had the same suspicion, researchers found.

The fact that the children could interpret friendly behavior as a sign of dispute resolution shows that “kids are more sensitive than we realize,” Cummings said. He cautioned that children will probably not be fooled by faked affection, because research shows they can detect silent anger.

Cummings and colleagues reported the new results in the November issue of the journal Developmental Psychology. The study on interpreting friendly behavior after a dispute involved 40 children, evenly split between the older and younger age groups. The study on the effect of hearing an adult explain that the fight was resolved involved 48 children in the two age groups.

Timothy Moore, a psychologist at York University in Toronto who studies the effect of parental fighting on children, said the study “reinforces the idea that children are probably by and large a lot sharper than we suppose.”

He said that although watching actors on a videotape is not the same as seeing one’s own parents in a real conflict, prior work has shown that such videotapes can provoke physical arousal and emotional reactions.