Children's Theories of the Self

Abstract

This article provides a theoretical review of the developmental origins of children's "folk theories" about the nature of the self, linking theoretical developments in philosophy with empirical discoveries from developmental psychology. The article first reviews children's views about the material nature of the self, outlining evidence that children naturally think about the self as distinct from the body. It then discusses children's understanding of the persistence of the self over time and, finally, explores children's views about conflict within the self. Together, these findings suggest that preschoolers possess stable, coherent, and predictive theories about the nature of the self that are stable across individuals, early emerging, and in some cases undergo interesting developmental change.

Varieties of value: Children differentiate caring from liking

“…If children view liking as distinct from caring, then they might understand conflicts between these forms of regard, such as the conflict between your valuations of the two jackets. Such findings would extend our knowledge of children's understanding of inner conflicts, an area with mixed findings (for a review see Starmans, 2017): Some studies report that children do not understand conflicts between an individual's preferences (or between their preferences and goals) until around age 7 (e.g., Choe et al, 2005;Yang & Frye, 2017), while other studies suggest children grasp these conflicts at age 4 or 5 (e.g., Rostad & Pexman, 2015;Starmans & Bloom, 2016).…”

How Children Construct Views of Themselves: A Social‐Developmental Perspective

“…Even young children do. Starmans () shows that young children see the self as something that is unique to a person, separate from the body, stable over time, and located within the head, behind the eyes. Despite our colloquial understanding of the self, arriving at a scientific definition of the self has proven difficult (Allport, ).…”

“…Individuals from non‐WEIRD countries make up just 3% of our participants, while making up 85% of the world's population (Nielsen et al., ). The special section helps address this limitation by reporting research in non‐WEIRD populations (e.g., Mexican‐American adolescents and their parents; Knight, Carlo, White, & Streit, ) and by calling for systematic research on how children from diverse cultural backgrounds differ in their beliefs about the nature of the self (Haimovitz & Dweck, ; Starmans, ), their views of themselves (Thomaes et al., ), and the socialization experiences that influence their views of themselves (Brummelman et al., ; Harris et al., ).…”

Young children infer psychological ownership from stewardship.

“…Alternatively, differences between children’s responses to the question about what the agents would claim and think could reflect limits in children’s understanding. In particular, children might have difficulty understanding that beliefs can conflict with certain kinds of feelings—this difficulty could stem from broader difficulties understanding inner conflicts (for a review, see Starmans, 2017). If so, we might expect children to struggle to understand other instances where feelings and thoughts conflict.…”