Social Development as Preference Management
How Infants, Children, and Parents Get What They Want from One Another

Presents social development in children through the language of preference management. A must-read for anyone interested in child development.

Rachel Karniol (Author)

9780521135306, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 19 April 2010

388 pages, 1 b/w illus. 168 tables
27.9 x 21.5 x 1.9 cm, 0.89 kg

"....Karniol has indeed provided an important resource in the study of human development. Researchers will find a wealth of ideas for investigation, and practitioners with the fortitude to persist through a text that consists primarily of descriptions of child–adult conversations rather than descriptions of effective strategies for fostering social development will find valuable insights regarding strategies that can foster the development of transformational thought as well as coping and self-regulation.... Karniol’s book should be required reading in the preparation of researchers interested in child development and recommended reading for educational practitioners. Most important, readers will find her ideas provocative and will be challenged to think about the nature of social development generally and to ponder the question of the appropriateness of the prominence of preferences in our interactions with others and in our conceptions of our identity."
– Patricia T. Ashton and Ana Carolina Useche, PsycCRITIQUES

Karniol engagingly presents social development in children through the language of preference management. Conversational excerpts garnered from around the world trace how parents talk about preferences, how infants' and children's emergent language conveys their preferences, how children themselves are impacted by others' preferences, and how they in turn influence the preferences of adults and peers. The language of preferences is used to crack into altruism, aggression, and morality, which are ways of coming to terms with other people's preferences. Behind the scenes is a cognitive engine that uses transformational thought – conducting temporal, imaginal, and mental transformations – to figure out other people's preferences and to find more sophisticated means of outmanoeuvring others by persuading them and playing with one's own mind and other people's minds when preferences are blocked. This book is a unique and sometimes amusing must-read for anyone interested in child development, language acquisition, socialisation, and communication.

Introduction
1. The baby 'preference game'
2. Children's expression of preferences
3. Emerging meta-preferences
4. Other people's preferences
5. Parenting and preference management
6. Channeling children's preferences
7. Temporizing preferences
8. Restricting children's preferences
9. Disciplining non-compliance
10. Planes of transformational thought: temporal, imaginal, mental
11. Manipulating others
12. Coping and self-regulating
13. Mind play: applying transformational thought
14. Minding one's own versus others' preferences: altruism, aggression and morality
15. Tying up.

Subject Areas: Educational psychology [JNC], Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Social, group or collective psychology [JMH], Child & developmental psychology [JMC], Psychology [JM]