Early Development and Parenting, zyxwvuts Vol. 2 (3), 157-167 (1993) zyxw ~~ .- ~ ~ . ~~____ .-- - ~- - . _. Mother-Child Disputes as Arenas for Fostering Negotiation Skills z Rosemary Leonard Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University zyxw of Western Sydnty, Nepean, PO Box 10, Kingswood, NSW Valsiner‘s concepts of the zone of free movement (ZFM) and the zone of promoted actions zyxw (ZPA) were applied to mother-child disputes to study how mothers discharge their role as experts in negotiation. Twenty mothers of 3-5-year-olds each reported zy 20 disputes, 10 in which the mother was making a request and 10 in which she was refusing her child’s request. The disputes were analysed sequentially using four models, preservation, copycat, rewardlpunishment, and provision of a rationale. The results showed that perseveration and copycat models were more likely to apply when there was negative affect. Mother’s m-requests fitted the rewardlpunishment model whereas mother’s refusals better fitted the provision of a rationale model. Information from follow-up interviews supported the notion that requests and refusals zy are being socialized differently. The results imply that, whereas children’s requests and refusals are within the ZFM, only their requests are within the ZPA. I Key words: Negotiation, value transmission, socialization, conflict. The interdependence of the developing child and the organization of his or her environment have been described by Winegar et al. (1989). Carers purposefully organize environments to achieve those goals they see as important and, as they develop, children start to reorganize their environ- ments. The goals chosen by carers will reflect both their personal choices and their interpretation of cultural expectations (Goodnow, 1990). Not all carers will be equally involved in organizing the child’s environment. The most important carers are the ’experts’,where an expert is defined as one who not only has skills and knowledge but also is placed in a relationship for which the goal is the promotion of the development of understanding in a novice. For many young children, the main, though probably not the only, expert-novice relationship is with the mother. Valsiner (1984) has used three zones to describe the child-situation interdependence. The zone of free movement contains all the actions that a child is permitted to perform in a particular situation including those the child has not performed. The zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) is the zone within which children can perform tasks with help from an expert that they would not be able to perform by themselves. The zone of promoted actions consists of those actions which the carer is consciously fostering in the child. The application of this framework to mother-child disputes places the mothers, as experts, in the position of providing a social environment for the child’s developing skill in negotiation. Their children influence the reorganization of that environment depending on how they manage their negotiations. For example, a mother can organize one aspect of the environment by choosing to ask small favours of her child. She will also decide on the limits of acceptable responses. She may set a wide ZFM in which all responses except extreme rudeness are 1057-3593/93/030157-11$10.50 zyxwvut 0 1993 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd Received 10 June 1992 Accepted 11 December 1992