How do children approach forgiveness?
Children’s views of forgiveness depend on how adults respond to wrongdoing
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In the aftermath of conflict, forgiveness helps heal wounds and restore harmony. While punishment or avoidance can deepen rifts, forgiveness opens the door to reconciliation and stronger interpersonal bonds.
Children as young as 4 recognize that forgiveness can restore damaged relationships and promote positive emotions. Even 4-year-olds are more forgiving of apologetic than unapologetic transgressors, suggesting they can already weigh contextual factors when deciding how to respond. As children mature, their understanding of forgiveness becomes more nuanced and sophisticated.
Now, a new study shows that children’s views on forgiveness are shaped by the way adults respond to wrongdoing. The study comes from the Cooperation Lab, led by Katherine McAuliffe, Associate Professor of Psychology at Boston College. Lab members study the psychological mechanisms that support cooperation, and how children develop cooperative abilities. They bring together methodologies and insights from psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology to better understand behaviors that are important to cooperative societies.
“As children mature, their understanding of forgiveness becomes more nuanced and sophisticated.”
“We’ve been looking at the various kinds of mechanisms that play a role in helping get cooperation off the ground,” says McAuliffe. “Some are prosocial things like fairness, honesty, and trust, and others — such as forgiveness — fall into the conflict management domain.”
McAuliffe and her colleagues initially looked at punishment as a way to promote cooperative behavior following a wrongdoing or transgression. They then wanted to expand the lens of their work and examine other justice-oriented interventions, such as compensation for the victim. In adults, interventions that are perceived as leading to greater justice make people more likely to forgive.
In the new study, 167 children aged 6 to 9 years old were shown multiple illustrations, each featuring a child taking a toy or food that belongs to another child. Participants were told that a teacher in the story responded in one of four ways: punishing the transgressor, compensating the victim by replacing the stolen object, pardoning the transgressor (i.e. letting them “off the hook”), or doing nothing.
Children were asked if they thought the victim would forgive the transgressor. They rated the victim most likely to forgive when the victim was compensated, followed by punishment and then pardoning of the transgressor, and least when the teacher did nothing. Children were then told whether the victim forgave the transgressor, and asked to rate that decision.
Children recognized that victims were not obligated to forgive regardless of intervention. However, they still judged victims who did not forgive more negatively, and thought they were more obliged to forgive, if the teacher had compensated the victim or punished the transgressor, compared to doing nothing. The results suggest that children view forgiveness as a generous – but optional – act that reflects well on the victim.
“Children view forgiveness as a generous – but optional – act that reflects well on the victim.”
Educators, parents, and caregivers might draw on these findings to resolve conflicts in ways that align with children’s evolving sense of fairness and justice. “Maybe we should focus more on victim-centered interventions when resolving children’s conflicts rather than simply punishing transgressors,” says study author Abby McLaughlin, a graduate student in the Cooperation Lab.
The team suggest allowing children a say in how transgressors are dealt with, which may lead to better preserved social relationships and harmony without lingering resentment. “Our results speak to the idea that children should have some form of agency in how conflicts that they’re involved in are resolved,” McLaughlin says. “Rather than everything being top-down from parents or other authority figures, having children share their opinions about how things can be dealt with might be helpful in fostering forgiveness, if that is a desired outcome.”
McLaughlin says that some schools are already putting most conflicts, especially around bullying, through those processes. “Having children be involved in those decisions about how conflict is dealt with, and if there is a punishment that occurs or a compensatory response that happens, children feel more represented in that process rather than simply one child getting sent to detention.”
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