Research
What the research tells us
An exploratory study done by Dr Paul Connolly and P Maginn in 1999 on the effects of sectarianism on the lives of children and young people in Northern Ireland found that:
- It is reasonable to assume that children, from about the age of three, are able to develop an understanding of the categories of 'Protestant' and 'Catholic' (although possibly not using those precise terms) and to apply negative characteristics to these.
- These initial categorisations can be understood to have an 'imprinting effect' where they progressively become embedded within the children's ways of thinking and behaving. With time, and as children are exposed to broader social contexts and experiences, they will come to develop more elaborate and sophisticated ways of identifying, categorising and evaluating others.
- It would appear that children are not passive receptacles to be filled with the sectarian beliefs and value-systems of their parents but are actively and competently involved in appropriating, re-working and reproducing these sectarian beliefs in order to make sense of their own experiences.
Find out more
Conclusion and recommendations of Connolly and Maginn's work.
Full report on line www.paulconnolly.net/publications/report_1999b/index.htm
Other evidence
Connolly and Maginn's findings that children from about the age of three are able to be aware of issues of similarities and difference falls in line with work done by other academics exploring children's perceptions of difference.
Within race equality, David Milner's work in Children and Race (1975) highlighted how early attitudes to race are formed and that children as young as five years old were able to make judgements along racial lines.
Tutchell (1990) and Kendal (1983) also found that children's awareness of gender and race, and similarities and differences between people, had begun to develop by the age of five. This was happening as these young children were building their sense of identity as part of establishing who they were and who they were not.
A common perception is that children pick up prejudiced or discriminatory views from their parents or adults around them. However, an extension to this perspective suggests that children do not just pick up intolerant views from parents or other adults but can also pick up discriminatory views because parents and adults they come into contact with avoid discussing such issues. Parents and adults who are themselves non-discriminatory but are not proactive in teaching about anti-discrimination do not ahelp to hone ideas or skills of young children in tackling discrimination. A key factor, suggest some educational psychologists, to thwarting prejudiced and discriminatory views is to talk about it.
Rebecca Bigler, PhD, a researcher and psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who studies stereotyping and cognitive skills such as classification said:
'Studies demonstrate that children are classifiers - they set up their world in categories such as male and female, black and white, and good and bad - in order to make sense of their environment.'
Studies done by Dr Bigler and colleagues around the world suggest that we need to explore those differences and teach our children about differences so that these differences do not translate into deficits.
This idea of explicitly addressing issues of difference concurs with advice given Connolly (1998) where he stresses the need to provide counter-biases to help challenge and undermine the existing prejudices and sectarian beliefs that the young children may have about one another.
The lesson plans included in this section provide activity ideas on how to introduce notions of difference and diversity in a positive way.