free play

Free play is one of the few contexts in which children independently organise their social lives, providing a particularly relevant setting for examining how peer culture is produced and negotiated in everyday interaction. This study explored how preschool children shape peer culture through rules, social relationships, inclusion and exclusion, and shared meaning-making. A focused ethnography was conducted with 21 children aged 3 years 9 months to 7 years 2 months in an established mixed-age preschool group in Croatia. The observational period lasted one month and included 17 observation days. Data collected through observation, field notes, and four focus groups were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings indicate that children independently initiate and sustain play, jointly negotiate rules and roles, and create shared symbolic meanings. Group belonging is continually reaffirmed through participation, while temporary forms of exclusion were observed in different interactional contexts, including responses to disruption and restrictions on participation. Educator mediation occurred in some situations in which children did not resolve disagreements independently. The findings position children as competent social actors whose peer culture constitutes a meaningful form of social life and provide contextual insight into how these processes unfold within an established mixed-age preschool group.

Socially complex peer play may provide opportunities for children to coordinate perspectives, negotiate roles, and respond to others' needs, but its association with prosocial judgment may differ according to children's social-cognitive resources. This small-scale longitudinal study examined whether mental state knowledge assessed at age 4–5 conditioned the concurrent association between socially complex peer play and prosocial judgment assessed at age 5–6. Participants were 35 children from a private nursery school in Japan. Mental state knowledge was assessed using a false-belief task. At age 5–6, children completed helping and sharing judgment tasks, and their free play was observed naturalistically across repeated focal-child observations. Socially complex peer play was indexed by the combined proportion of associative and cooperative play. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that the interaction between earlier mental state knowledge and socially complex peer play significantly predicted sharing judgment. The corresponding interaction for helping was positive but did not reach the conventional significance threshold. Sensitivity analyses using heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors supported the sharing result. Given the modest sample size, the findings should be interpreted as preliminary. They suggest that the association between socially complex peer play and prosocial judgment may differ according to children's earlier social-cognitive resources.

Family mealtime is a recurring everyday context for parent-child interaction, typically involving family members sitting together with the shared purpose of eating and socializing. However, little is known about the quality of parent-child interaction in this context, as this is often assessed during play or structured tasks. The aim of this study was to examine whether family mealtime constituted a context evoking specific parent-child interaction quality. Participants were 110 families with 24–36-month-old toddlers from the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Parent–toddler interactions during free play, clean-up, and mealtime were video-recorded in the home. Interactions were coded using the Coding Interactive Behavior manual to assess parental Acknowledging, Overriding, and Dyadic Reciprocity. We assessed mean-level differences (contextual continuity) and rank-order consistency (contextual stability) across the three contexts. Means for Overriding and Dyadic Reciprocity were significantly lower during family mealtime than during both play and clean-up, suggesting contextual discontinuity; i.e., that at the group level, mealtime interactions involve less inappropriate parental disruption and redirection, but also lower mutual responsiveness within the dyad. Acknowledging, Overriding, and Dyadic Reciprocity showed no significant correlations across family mealtime and the other contexts, indicating contextual instability, i.e., that within families, interaction quality during mealtime is not necessarily associated with interaction quality in other contexts. Our results suggest that interaction quality cannot be assumed to generalize across contexts. Family mealtime appears to elicit distinct interaction patterns on more parameters and may be an important setting for observational assessment. Clarifying for whom and under what conditions mealtime fosters positive or negative interaction patterns may guide future research and intervention design.

وعده‌های غذایی خانوادگی زمینه‌ای روزمره و تکرارشونده برای تعامل والد-کودک است که معمولاً اعضای خانواده را در کنار هم و با هدف مشترک خوردن و معاشرت گرد هم می‌آورد. با این حال، اطلاعات اندکی درباره کیفیت تعامل والد-کودک در این زمینه وجود دارد، چرا که این کیفیت اغلب در حین بازی یا وظایف ساختاریافته ارزیابی می‌شود. هدف این مطالعه بررسی این بود که آیا وعده غذایی خانوادگی زمینه‌ای است که کیفیت خاصی از تعامل والد-کودک را برمی‌انگیزد یا خیر. شرکت‌کنندگان شامل ۱۱۰ خانواده با کودکان نوپای ۲۴ تا ۳۶ ماهه از منطقه کلان‌شهری کپنهاگ بودند. تعاملات والد-کودک در طول بازی آزاد، جمع‌آوری اسباب‌بازی و وعده غذایی در خانه فیلم‌برداری شد. تعاملات با استفاده از راهنمای Coding Interactive Behavior برای ارزیابی شاخص‌های Acknowledging، Overriding و Dyadic Reciprocity والدین کدگذاری شد. تفاوت‌های میانگین (تداوم زمینه‌ای) و ثبات رتبه‌ای (پایداری زمینه‌ای) در سه زمینه مورد ارزیابی قرار گرفت. میانگین‌های Overriding و Dyadic Reciprocity در طول وعده غذایی خانوادگی به طور معناداری کمتر از هر دو زمینه بازی و جمع‌آوری اسباب‌بازی بود که نشان‌دهنده ناپیوستگی زمینه‌ای است؛ یعنی در سطح گروهی، تعاملات وعده غذایی شامل اختلال و هدایت نامناسب والدین به میزان کمتر، اما همچنین پاسخ‌دهی متقابل کمتر درون دیاد است. هیچ همبستگی معناداری بین Acknowledging، Overriding و Dyadic Reciprocity در وعده غذایی خانوادگی و سایر زمینه‌ها مشاهده نشد که بیانگر ناپایداری زمینه‌ای است؛ یعنی درون خانواده‌ها، کیفیت تعامل در طول وعده غذایی لزوماً با کیفیت تعامل در زمینه‌های دیگر مرتبط نیست. نتایج ما نشان می‌دهد که نمی‌توان فرض کرد کیفیت تعامل در زمینه‌های مختلف تعمیم‌پذیر است. به نظر می‌رسد وعده غذایی خانوادگی الگوهای تعاملی متمایزی را در پارامترهای بیشتری برمی‌انگیزد و ممکن است زمینه‌ای مهم برای ارزیابی مشاهده‌ای باشد. روشن شدن اینکه برای چه کسانی و تحت چه شرایطی وعده غذایی الگوهای تعاملی مثبت یا منفی را تقویت می‌کند، می‌تواند راهنمای پژوهش‌ها و طراحی مداخلات آینده باشد.