Navigating Family Ties: Young Children's Cognitive Representations of the Family Network

Family is often central to an individual's early life. However, past work suggests mixed evidence as to whether young children can represent family relationships, showing even the words used to represent these relationships—like grandmother—are hard for young children to learn and define. The current study investigates whether 4-to-5-year-old children (N=64) recognize relationships in their families, testing the hypothesis that children can recognize intimate relationships in their environments. Children expected moms to seek out comfort from maternal but not paternal grandparents and expected dads to seek out comfort from paternal but not maternal grandparents. Children did not share those expectations for general information-seeking, and instead expected their parents to seek information for the relative with the relevant skill even when that grandparent was not socially close to the parent. These results suggest that from a young age, humans have the capacity to recognize relationships within their earliest social network—the family.