Human Services News

From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:

Children whose parents were trained in mediation skills had better conflict-resolution skills than those whose parents did not receive training.

That's the finding of a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and published in the May/June 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.

The study examined the effects of parents' mediation of sibling conflicts on children's conflict understanding and resolution skills.

Mediation is a conflict management technique in which a neutral third party (in this case, the parent) intervenes in a conflict to help the people in the dispute reach a mutually satisfactory solution.

Half of the parents (the mediation group) were trained in the use of mediation and asked to use this training in their children's disputes; the other half (the control group) were asked to intervene as they normally would when disputes arose.

The researchers found that children whose parents had mediated their disputes had more sophisticated conflict-resolution skills at the end of the study than did families in the untrained group.

Conflicts that arose at home were resolved more positively in the mediation group, according to the parents' reports, in that children behaved more constructively, the conflicts were resolved more equitably, and the children were more involved in resolving the disputes.

In terms of children's skills in taking others' perspectives, children in the mediation group were better able to identify one another's goals and emotions and to understand their siblings' perspectives in conflict negotiations than were children in the control group.

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